Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson The American Cratylus Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse HD, Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry Andrew Mossin

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry Andrew Mossin

MALE SUBJECTIVITY AND POETIC FORM IN “NEW AMERICAN” POETRY

Copyright © Andrew Mossin, 2010. Cover image: Handwriting from one of Robert Duncan’s notebooks, used by permission of the Jess Collins Trust. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61732–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mossin, Andrew. Male subjectivity and poetic form in “new American” poetry / Andrew Mossin. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) ISBN 978–0–230–61732–2 (hardback) 1. American poetry—Male authors—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Subjectivity in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Masculinity in literature. 6. Authorship—Collaboration. 7. Poetics. I. Title. PS310.S85M67 2010 8219.54093521—dc22

2009047063

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction “In Thicket”: Charles Olson, Poetic Career, and the Crisis of Cold War Masculinity Two “Homosexual Advertising”: Gay Subjectivity, Modernist Form, and Robert Duncan’s The Venice Poem Three In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and the Poetics of (Mis)Translation Four Recovering the Public World: Robin Blaser, Hannah Arendt, and the Discourses of Self and Other in Image-Nations 1–12 Five “Collapsed Aura”: Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and the Poetics of Discrepant Subjectivity in “Song of the Andoumboulou” Afterword: Toward a Poetics of Mutual Understanding

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References

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Index

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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his book, which had its beginnings more than fifteen years ago in conversations and discussions that took place in graduate seminars and creative writing workshops at Temple University, could not have been written, let alone completed, without the help, support, and generous input of many people along the way, more than I can thank or acknowledge here. I’m particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues in the graduate program at Temple, especially Kim Bernstein, Kevin Armitage, Seth Frechie, Jenny Gough, and Rachel Tzvia Back, with whom I spent many hours talking through issues related to our own early efforts in scholarship and poetry. For introducing me to the poets and poetics discussed here, I am deeply grateful to my teachers at Temple: Susan Stewart, Toby Olson, Lawrence Venuti, and Daniel T. O’Hara. I want to thank as well Charles Bernstein, who read an early version of this book in his role as outsider reader on my dissertation committee. His comments and suggestions, especially on Charles Olson and the complex set of issues related to formations of masculinity, were tremendously useful and have been integrated into my revisions. Robert Bertholf and Michael Basinski at The Poetry Collection and Literary Archives at SUNY/Buffalo were extremely generous with their time, providing me invaluable access to a range of Duncan materials housed there. I want to extend special thanks to James Maynard, assistant curator of The Poetry Collection at SUNY/Buffalo, for his patience and diligence in providing me with the scan of Duncan’s handwriting that appears on the cover. Paul Naylor, my editor and publisher at Singing Horse Press, also read and commented on an early draft of the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions for its improvement. Kevin Killian read and offered careful, generous commentary on a late draft of the chapter on Duncan’s The Venice Poem, and provided me with useful information and material on Duncan and Spicer’s relationship at the time of this poem’s writing; I’m especially grateful to

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him for providing me with a copy of Spicer and Duncan’s “A Canto for Ezra Pound.” Thanks to Lisa Jarnot for letting me read selections from a draft of her biography, The Ambassador from Venus: A Comprehensive Biography of Robert Duncan. For her long-standing friendship and willingness to listen and share ideas, as I recounted portions of this book to her, I want to thank Abigail Reikow. She has formed a vital part of that small community that has made this project possible. Many thanks to the editors and production staff at Palgrave, including Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, and Heather Faulls, whose care and attention to the manuscript every step along the way made completion of this book a genuinely pleasurable experience. For her careful attention to the index, I am deeply grateful to Deborah Lopez, who helped make this document both clearer and more comprehensive. Special thanks to Rohini at Newgen for her careful copyediting of the manuscript. My deepest thanks go to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who served as my MA advisor for creative writing and as my dissertation advisor at Temple. Her support over the years, unstinting and profoundly generous, has often made the difference between giving up and continuing on this path that began with the first workshop I took with Rachel in the spring of 1990. Both an assiduous reader of and advocate for the work this book represents, Rachel has been tutelary spirit, advisor, and collegial companion through the changes that life has brought, and brings. In a time that has tested the bonds of my family and challenged each of us in ways both regrettable and transformative, I thank my daughters, Mia and Isabel, for their patience and laughter and strength. What I have learned from my children as a father informs all of what follows. This book is dedicated, with love, to them. As this book neared production, I learned of the death of Robin Blaser from David Farwell, Blaser’s long-time companion. In a sad coincidence, my last letter to Blaser was written and sent to his home in Vancouver the day he died, May 7, 2009. The work that appears here has been inspired in every sense of the word by Blaser’s humane and intellectually far-ranging approach to contemporary poetry and poetics, a legacy in which we all share. With the exception of chapter two, the essays included here have been previously published; they have since been significantly revised for publication here. Many thanks to the editors of the following publications: “ ‘In thicket’: Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, and the Construction of Masculinity at Mid-Century.” Charles Olson: A Poet’s Prose, ed. Gary GrieveCarlson. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2007. First published in Journal of Modern Literature 28, 4 (Summer 2005).

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“Recovering the Public World: Robin Blaser, Hannah Arendt, and the Discourses of Self and Other in Image-Nations 1–12.” Even on Sunday: Essays and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser, ed. Miriam Nichols. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2002. “Unveiling Expectancy: Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan and the Formation of Discrepant Subjectivity in Eroding Witness.” Baltimore: Callaloo (Fall 2000). “In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and the Poetics of (Mis)Translation.” Contemporary Literature 38, 4 (Winter 1997).

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Introduction

I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns . . . and see and hear you, and what you give and take; What is there you cannot give and take? —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass And all I’ve been Is not myself? I think myself Is what I’ve seen and not myself —George Oppen, “Myself I Sing” Who cares for anything I do? And what do I care? To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination. —William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

I In 1991, while a graduate student in the MA program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, I started writing poems on eleven-byfourteen broad sheets of heavy manila paper. The poems, modeled somewhat loosely on the large format pages of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (1983) in the original edition published by the University of California Press, were typed onto the pages on my IBM Selectric (I had a MAC Classic, but still preferred the stiffness of the Selectric keyboard and the print balls that allowed one to change the font at will) and kept in a black artist’s portfolio case I picked up at Utretch’s Art Supply on Chestnut Street. I highlight these details because—apart from the content and language of the poems themselves, their aspirant form as initial efforts in open form poetics—it was the sheer materiality of making these poems, of having to insert the large sheets into the roller, adjusting and changing the font ball, taking care not to make mistakes as I typed, that suggested to me a kind of participation in a form of self-publication and generative making that I was discovering in the poetries and biographies of Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Olson, and others made

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available to me through my teachers, notably Susan Howe, Susan Stewart, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Reading Duncan’s prefatory remarks to Groundwork: Before the War (1984), “Some Notes on Notation,” I saw in his connection of typography, line placement, and visual awareness of the cadences of the poem a way to proceed that I could mimic, if not fully understand: The cadences of the verse, and, in turn, the interpenetration of cadences in sequence is, for me, related to the dance of my physical body. My hands keep time and know more than my brain does of measure. Stress patterns are dancing feet; my ear and voice follow a deeper rhythm, the coming and going of a life/death tide back of the beat of the heart and the breath. The literal time of the poem is experienced as given, even as the literal size of a painter’s canvas is given. (N.p.)

Enacting the “coming and going of a life/death tide,” Duncan’s work modeled for me a way of working that emphasized conscious awareness of silences, marked on the page by caesuras, gaps between words and lines, the white depth of the page surrounding words and lines—a field I was given permission (or so it seemed) to enter. Here is part of a poem from that period, aptly titled “For Duncan”: Scale it down to hear melody of the marksman wearing red cool motherboy Flesh has its secrecies approximate conditions the mtal offers no relief when I have stood w/out fair One

whitegummed

to a murdered dawn say Come forward awhile wastage complete the dry months I read You might have been Christ, some terrible force that would compel us to change, you you might have been an angel— & gave up the bastard case in high forgetfulness

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While the poem strikes me, years later, as both mawkish and derivative, a pastiche of Pound (from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”), early Eliot, and Duncan, it also represents an initial effort on my part to confront—poetically, formally, and in some liminal ways autobiographically—questions that are at the heart of this study. What are the relationships between poetic form and subjectivity? How does the “I,” the speaking subject of a poetic text, circumvent or rearticulate cultural forms of masculinity? What kinds of manhood do we find in the work of the poets under study here? What is the relation between the poet writing in isolation and perceptions of a public space outside the poem, of audience and readers who form perhaps the most visible community of reception for the poet’s work? How do poets who actively identify with practices and aesthetic criteria that place them at the margins of public recognition—margins that are by no means static or without porous layers—achieve a level of visibility that, if not entirely overcoming the limits of reception, moves the work more fully into public discourse? Finally, as this is a book very much about the connections between and among poets and the poetic careers that develop through the flux and unfixable forms of lived action in the public world—whether that world is the local bar, living room, or university classroom—what can we say about the relation between the forms of community that arise out of specific circumstances, propelled by the poets’ own need to be heard, and the work that results from this collaborative environment? The essays in this book were written partly in response to these questions. As such, they explore differing conditions of masculinity and the relationship among subjectivity, poetic form, and gender. My argument, in its barest form, is that masculinity and the variable subjectivities that developed its discourses are foundational aspects of male poetic practice, whether we are talking of the pitched tough-guy talk of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley in their correspondence with one another during the 1950s or, in a very different register, of the heated exchange between Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser regarding their translations of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères (1973). Teasing out the relationship between masculinity and the broader framework of gender and the authorial subjectivity that develops in response to sociocultural pressures experienced by the male subject forms a critical part of my endeavor here. When I began writing this book I wanted to understand more clearly how poetry by men, my own included, understood or, alternatively, hid its means, methods, aims, and resistances as part of an ongoing discourse of male writing. Moreover, as my interest was drawn to the genitive stages of career, I sought to explore how certain male poets at early, transitional stages in their writing lives found ways of articulating their manhood in a body of work that represented the discordant and

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intractable lines of ambition, assertiveness, and authority. Thus, my chapter on Duncan’s The Venice Poem explores the tension between gay male subjectivity and the formal accomplishment this poem represents as a bridge work between two stages of Duncan’s career: a movement that can be loosely characterized as the shift from ephebe and novice to not so much mastery but adeptness. Tracing this seam between early career and the work that later signifies the poet’s authority and range informs my discussion of each of the writers here, to lesser or greater degrees. If delineating the connections between formations of manhood in the work forms one foundational part of this project, in other ways I was also drawn to pairings and other forms of literary partnering that each of these poets experienced in distinctive ways over the course of their early careers. In some ways artificial, as much separating as joining writers, literary partnering as I’ve outlined in the succeeding chapters suggests a way of discussing the tensions of affiliation while engaging in a more layered reading of the poems that result from necessarily social activities of collaboration, conversation, sharing of ideas, and so forth that are part and parcel of the poetic process. Early on in my research for this book, Wayne Kostenbaum’s Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989) suggested a particularly useful way of looking at the pairing and triadic formations that appear in the following chapters. As Kostenbaum says: When two men write together, they indulge in double talk; they rapidly patter to obscure their erotic burden, but the ambiguities of their discourse give the taboo subject liberty to roam. Men who collaborate engage in metaphorical sexual intercourse, and the text they balance between them is alternatively the child of their sexual union and a shared woman. (3)

While the poets discussed by Kostenbaum (Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot and Pound) can be said to have collaborated more directly on each other’s texts, the correspondence of Olson and Creeley and the nightly sessions of “dictational” writing conducted by Spicer, Blaser, and Duncan certainly represent other formations of double talk, writing that is two-voiced at least. Without being proscriptive about how and in what ways the collaboration represents either a child or a woman held in common between two men, it’s safe to say that the erotic impositions of collaboration permeate much of the writing discussed here. Insofar as literary collaboration and partnering suggests forms of the communal, my work here also addresses (most directly in the first two chapters) the viability of community as a social model through which poems get

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written and circulated. Indeed, this project originally developed out of my long-standing concern with issues of the social, as these became manifest in a number of contemporary poets’ responses to community and “public voice.” Drawn to the works of Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, and other San Francisco and Berkeley based figures, I became interested in how these writers had initiated poetic communities or, perhaps more appropriately, poetic coteries, and situated themselves in a collaborative set of personal and aesthetic relations that had a direct effect on the poetry they produced for and with each other. For “activist” poets such as Duncan and Allen Ginsberg the question of their affiliations as public and “oppositional” poets has particular relevance: both situated themselves firmly within a complex interrelation of Leftist and gay activist political-social ideas then beginning to achieve wider circulation. Moreover, both assumed roles early on that forced them to confront more directly the divide between public/ private stances in work that tended from the outset either to be shared among a select community of auditors (in the case of Duncan, Blaser, and Spicer) or (as would be the case with Ginsberg) to find widespread circulation in the beat communities of the North Shore, Haight Ashbury, and beyond. In other ways, my book seeks to investigate how friendships between poets, relationships that became central to the poetics and poetry of Olson, Duncan, and so on, figured into the mix of politics, aesthetic debate, and gender figuration that mark their poetries The exclusionary, homosocial, and misogynistic nature of these various partnerships and groupings has been noted by a number of critics [Davidson, Guys (2004); DuPlessis, “Manhood”], but my work here seeks to explore the enabling aspects of these communally developed poetries, especially in light of their avant-garde and innovative praxis. Without a doubt the communal exists in uneasy relation with the singular, a tension that my chapter on Duncan and Blaser’s translations of Nerval certainly highlights. At the same time, as Andrew Epstein points out, the literary friendships and partnerings that mark so much of the work that got done under the banners of experimentalism in the 1950s and 1960s allowed for an even greater level of creativity and social responsiveness: “These poets seem to value collaboration most because it can push an individual writer in new, unpredictable directions through a mixture of competition and mutual inspiration, and because it can create work which is polyvocal, unstable, and mobile” (35). While Epstein has in mind the collaborative work of New York School poets such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and so on, his analysis applies as well to the poets I discuss here, poets whose linkages to one another extend far beyond the borders of any one poetic grouping and allow us to understand more fully how poetic practice and performances of the social interact and relate

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to one another, forming a palimpsest of relations that inform the production, reading, and reception of poems. In the spirit of Spicer’s oft-cited line from Admonitions, “There is really no single poem” (Collected Books 61), it could be said of the poetries and poets discussed here that there is really no single poet; rather, we encounter poets whose works continually negotiate and emanate from a co-joint space of authorship, one that is both communal and collaborative. This book is by no means an attempt to historicize in any systematic way the multifaceted sociocultural embeddedness of the poetries covered here, roughly starting in the late 1940s and extending through the 1980s. Rather, I’ve chosen poets whose careers and moment represent particularly revealing tendencies within the postwar avant-garde, specifically as these relate to questions of gender and the development of alternative poetic forms in response to larger cultural and historical pressures placed on the poets and their work. Targeting the group of poets that circulated in and around the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance initially suggested a way of grounding a larger study, one that goes beyond the scope of this project, of the development of alternative American poetries (including the works of minority and women poets) as these developed over the course of the next several decades. Part of this project, specifically my chapters on Olson’s early career and Duncan’s The Venice Poem, respond to what K.A. Cuordileone has identified as “an excessive preoccupation with-and anxiety about—masculinity in Cold War American politics” (516). While I don’t deal specifically with the circumstances of this preoccupation or seek to fashion a sociocultural rubric for investigating the connection between this cultural anxiety and the early careers of Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and Blaser, my work nonetheless relies on the scholarship of Cuordileone, Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Eric Keenaghan to trace out certain connections between postwar and Cold War cultural formations and the innovative poetries that developed through those years. While attention to chronological continuity and broader historical frameworks has not dominated my structuring of this project and, with the inclusion of Olson and Creeley, I have clearly stepped away from an entirely West Coast orientation, I have strived toward an organizational principle that emphasizes a selection of players, if not the entire range, from which one can draw certain conclusions about how experimental and avant-garde poetry written by several male poets in the United States evolved at a critical period during the late 1940s and early 1950s; this was the time when, as Cuordileone observes, Americans were experiencing “an era of accelerated social change in which male writers were chafing against the prescribed male role and all that came with it—the constraints of breadwinning, family life, and the togetherness ethos, the conformity induced by

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the organization or overly demanding women” (531). The poetries engaged here, then, suggest different approaches and responses, aesthetic and political outcomes of work undertaken by writers who experienced those pressures. Still, as Cuordileone points out, historicizing sexual anxiety is risky business. Critics of the period have to be careful of connecting the dots too quickly and in ways that suggest one-to-one connections between evincible, lived experience and the art works produced in the wake of larger cultural forces. Grappling with the layers of meaning proposed by these poets’ individual and collective responses and seeking to illuminate wherever possible what the documents and life histories and poems reveal about gender and its relation to subjective and aesthetic experience form the key strands of this book’s interrogative stance. Following the lead of Libbie Rifkin, whose Career Moves (2003) establishes in a particularly cogent fashion the combined factors of geographical and institutional emplacement and the interpersonal exchanges of poets that occur off the radar, as well as in the more public venues of the lecture hall, classroom, local bar, or other communal meeting space, I use a variety of materials and approaches here to get to the interrelationship of masculinity and poetic practice. My questions developed out of close readings of the poems and consideration of extra-poetic materials that help situate and contextualize the poems themselves. What role did the coterie or surrounding community of poets play in the development and writing of the poems? To what degree did collaboration figure into the process, either the kind of round-table writing that gave rise to Duncan and Spicer’s work on “An Elegy for Ezra Pound” or the sort of co-creative effort represented by the Olson-Boldereff correspondence? What life circumstances helped generate the formal choices made in the work? In what ways does the personal, that is, subjectively based, inflect the public discourse of poetics? Using letters, diaries, biographical and autobiographical materials—along with the “finished,” published poems themselves—I tease out the complicated elements of friendly rivalry and discord, authorial agency and subjectivity, to assess the relationship between these factors and poems that are so often treated through close readings as singular objects of reading and writing. “The living poems,” John Emil Vincent argues, “are gone . . . I, for one, prefer the poems on the page to the biography, the tales of bar talk, and the histories of alliances and fallings out” (155). Yet, as this book suggests, the biography, tales of bar talk, and so on form another route of meaning-making: the composable aftermath and legacy of those living poems on the page. Knowing the particulars of the social conditions that gave rise to certain poems; the lines of circulation and reception established within a given cohorts’ culture; and the deeply subjective choices that are at stake both before and after the

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poet comes to her writing table help us discern more clearly the layered meanings any single poem proposes to us. Understanding the “larger social texture” (6), as Rifkin refers to it, we read poems in the context of career, career in the context of poems, and the lives of poets as inseparable and polyvalent signs of poems that reflect back, unevenly, uncertainly, but from within a space of writing that can be made legible in the thick description available to us as literary anthropologists. Doing such work means a turning away from the imprimatur of canonicity, still the singular mark of acceptance in both academic settings and the culture-at-large, and engaging texts whose importance to us needs to be revised, re-viewed, re-seen, not only in light of later scholarship on the poet’s work, but as part of an ongoing conversation about poetic materials whose stability can never be assumed. In this sense, reading a work such as Duncan’s Venice Poem for its refractive effects within multiple settings (literary, archival, interpersonal) builds an occasion not so much for a reconsideration of an undervalued work of genius (certainly one major approach that’s been applied to Spicer’s work in recent years), but for a recalibration of our understanding of the local events that anticipated, supplanted and have formed a set of shadow texts around the poetic text. As per one of this book’s focal points, masculinity and its shadowy histories, unwritten, revealed then lost again, establish a tension between the work and other layers of social meaning that, in sum, create the effect of meaning the poem delivers—or fails to. Of course, the moves here are complicated as one’s reading can quickly become subject to a form of “backshadowing,” to use Michael André Bernstein’s potent term, the reading of texts as evidence of what we already know happened. But poems do live, if they do, in the continuous present of reading acts that corroborate both the textual particularity on the page and what we can usefully consider of refractions cast through the uncertain prism of our shared social histories. II The poem if it reflects the sea reflects only its dance upon that profound depth where it seems to triumph. —Willliams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

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While the poets represented here all share a joint legacy in the modernist and postmodernist avant-garde, their work also has roots in the lyric tradition. Insofar as the work of Olson, Duncan, Creeley, and so on qualify lyric’s importance, it also attests to the ways in which lyric retains its aura, despite the universalisms and trans-historical positioning one often encounters in lyric. Theodor Adorno’s famous criticism of lyric in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” lay the groundwork for a critique that has remained central to a consideration of the political limits of a form that, for contemporary poets, can just as often represent a cultural dead-end as an expression of a “uniquely human” and highly subjective experience. The universalism and solipsism of lyric remain among the chief concerns of Adorno’s essay. As he says: Immersion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric poem to the status of something universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed. It thereby anticipates, spiritually, a situation in which no false universality, that is, nothing profoundly particular, continues to fetter what is other than itself, the human. The lyric work hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation. The danger peculiar to lyric, however, lies in the fact that its principle of individuation never guarantees that something binding and authentic will be produced. It has no say over whether the poem remains within the contingency of mere separate existence. (38)

Adorno goes on to suggest that the added danger of lyric is its separation from those very social forces that would make of poetic expression a vehicle for political and cultural change, rather than an object fetishized for its voicing of the ideological fiction of a self speaking in solitude. While Olson’s notable comment from “Projective Verse” that the contemporary poet must strive to move past the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Human 59) has held sway for more than two generations, it’s important to assess the ways in which, for Duncan, Blaser, and Mackey, as for Olson himself, the problem remained discovering over and over again the methods and content adequate to a poetics of postmodern subjectivity.1 From Duncan’s late Romantic positing of a shifting and multiple “self” echoed back through time to Olson’s situating of an “objectivist,” postmodern subject to Mackey’s inscribing of cross-cultural, multi-textual voicings, at stake for each of these writers has been the contestable categories of “being” and “self” and discovery of a language adequate to their expression. In terms of contemporary American poetry, two predominant strains of poetics have emerged in response to the questions posed by lyric and the

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subjectivities inscribed therein. As Leonard Schwartz proposes in his essay “A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Some Thoughts on Lyric Poetry”: The dominant currents in American poetry today insist either on the exclusivity of the personal self, the empirical ego, on . . . the “immediacy of the self ” or simply “the immediate”; or else, and in direct opposition, the other dominant current, with another name and with other players insists on the exclusivity of the material, social and linguistic nexus from which the poem arises, a material and social nexus the poem sees itself as the subversion of, in a mode of composition [that can be termed] “the negation of the immediate.” (20)

As Language writing and other poetries of the contemporary avant-garde have shown us, notions of the dominant versus the marginal, immediate versus the mediated, are hardly uniform or homogenous. And while one might chafe at a representation of an arguably varied and discursive set of practices that can’t be boiled down to the identifiable categories of mainstream versus experimental, traditional versus innovative, Schwartz is right in suggesting the terms of a rift (or rifts) in American poetry that are situated not only in the politics of the poets working on this or that side of the experimental divide, but on the ethical, aesthetical, and formal decisions that mark their work and push it to one end of the poetry field or another. As Charles Bernstein argues in “State of the Art,” When poetry averts conformity it enters into the contemporary: speaking to the pressures and conflicts of the moment with the means just then at hand. By which I mean I care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business: I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated. (2)

The degree to which lyric poetry “averts conformity” while retaining the mark of the contemporary, possessed of the edge that Bernstein and others working in the idiom of avant-garde practices seek to maintain, remains one of the questions running throughout my discussion in this book. At stake, then, are a politics of lyric and the continuing viability of lyric writing as part of postmodern poetic discourse. For if works by each of the writers discussed in the chapters that follow suggest an unabashed attachment to aspects of lyric “voicing,” procedurally and contextually they also draw attention to the ways in which the lyric subject remains both a troubled and contested site for the contemporary poet. As Nathaniel Mackey suggests

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in his 1992 interview with Ed Foster, at least to a certain degree the suspicion with which many present-day poets regard lyric has to do with a questioning of the tenets of privative, subject-based loss and elegiac mystification that have been a central part of the lyric tradition: One of the reasons the lyric is in a troubled position is the elegiac tradition with regard to the lyric, the investment in loss that tradition brings with it, where you seem to be at odds with a political will to overcome loss. In saying that poetry, if not a loser’s art, is intimate with loss, I’m talking in part about the elegiac tradition, which does build on and lament loss in a way which becomes in some ways self-perpetuating, in some ways a consolation to losses that a more manifestly political will towards social change might tell you are unnecessary and not inevitable. The argument would be that there are losses that can be turned around and that one’s job is to be about the business of achieving that turn-around rather than lamenting loss . . . I think the lyric tradition is troubled by that problematic, but it’s also a problematic that the lyric tradition has acknowledged. (53)

Pushing past these consoling narratives and culturally conservative elements of lyric writing that circumscribe critical intervention and analysis has occupied a large portion of each of these poets’ projects. While Duncan’s position would seem on one level to be the most open to criticism for its unwavering attachment to the properties of lyric imagination, which is to say to that loss and elegiac impulse Mackey identities as fundamental to lyric practice, Duncan nonetheless complicates such a view by his simultaneous containment of nostalgia and univocal expressiveness in work whose intellectual range de-mystifies and enlarges upon its sources in the lyric tradition. In a somewhat different vein, Blaser’s response to the problem of lyric has been to integrate a more thoroughly post-structuralist approach to language and subjectivity (including the use of psychoanalytic, religious, and philosophical texts) as a way of grounding his analysis of poetic discourse and the expressivist assumptions that have been foundational to the lyric project. Olson’s work similarly participates in the exploration of a post-lyric discourse of expressivity and historical content while seeking to further the properties of lyric in his twentieth-century epic The Maximus Poems (1983). Finally, for Mackey, the project has been to reinscribe within his lyrical practice elements of a “discrepant engagement” in a mixture of Western and non-Western discourses of spirituality, mysticism, and ritual. As the writings of each of these writers to differing degrees and with different results suggest, we certainly can no longer assume the precedence of

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the Romantic-based short lyric as an exemplary model of poetic practice and consideration—even as its contemporary version seems to have become the most widely circulated and visible model for poetry in the culture-at-large.2 The monologic nature of lyric utterance, the presumptions of interiority and individual presence, the implicit separation between speaker and social reality—each of these points up the ideologically and politically troubling position lyric holds within contemporary avant-garde poetic discourse. Whether the neo-Romantic sublime of Stevens or the Keatsian inflected work of late Williams, both the autonomy of the lyric subject and the cultural position from which he/she speaks has increasingly come under attack. Returning to Adorno again, we find: “Poetic [i.e., lyric] subjectivity is itself indebted to privilege: the pressures of the struggle for survival allow only a few human beings to grasp the universal through immersion in the self or to develop as autonomous subject capable of freely expressing themselves” (45). Adorno’s critique of lyric has, in the contemporary period, been perhaps most forcefully extended in this country by the work of Language writers such as Ron Silliman, whose key early essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” set the tone for much of the critical writing that centered around the Language-based small magazines of the early 1970s: Quite clearly capitalism has its own mode of reality which is passed through the language and imposed on its speakers. The social function of the language arts, especially the poem, place them in an important position to carry the class struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness. (131; Emphasis in the original)

The rhetoric is notable on a number of counts, not least of which is its positioning of poetry as a concertedly social and material practice, one that Silliman suggests has a major role to play in the ongoing class conflict of American consumer culture. Whether one accepts Silliman’s class analysis of poetry’s function or not, his identifying of the problem inherent in a poetry and poetic practice that would claim a space outside of and beyond the parameters of the social is key. It also usefully frames out a longer discussion of the ways in which Duncan, Blaser, Olson, Creeley, and Mackey position themselves vis-à-vis a poetic genealogy and tradition that are ostensibly Romantic and lyric in origin, even as their work proposes alternative, interrogative versions of poetic subjectivity. Theirs remains work that mediates between the word as a culturally determined sign and the word as a “presence.”3 Marjorie Perloff, in her essay “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric,” has written that “minor poets continue to write neo-Romantic lyric, at the

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same time [that] a new poetry is emerging that wants to open the field so as to make contact with the world as well as the word” (181). In the twenty-five years since Perloff wrote those words, much has happened to suggest the parameters of what that new poetry might look like. Contemporary work by Jena Osman, Peter O’Leary, Phillip Foss, Harryette Mullen, Benjamin Hollander, Carla Harryman, Will Alexander, and others have all shown an abiding concern for the ways in which poetry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can “make contact with the world as well as the world.” At the very least, one needs to query Perloff’s use of “neo-Romantic lyric” as the whipping boy for all that’s wrong in contemporary poetry ca. 1985; rather, as I suggest, Perloff’s critique of lyric tends to simplify and overstate the case by reviewing all forms of lyric through the same lens. In this regard, Mark Jeffreys’ more recent re-historicizing of lyric (especially in its pre-Romantic variations) in “Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics” provides a nuanced corrective to contemporary formulations of the genre (including Perloff’s) that tend to discuss all lyric writing through the paradigm of Romanticism: Even Perloff, the acutest critic of the evolution of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury lyric poetry, blurs the terms lyric and Romantic lyric so that it is unclear whether she contests the genre itself or only a particular historical variation. On the one hand, she has repeatedly characterized the specifically Romantic lyric—a category that she uses to encompass Romantic, Victorian, and symbolist lyrics, along with the “paradigmatic modernist lyric”—as reflecting a narrow, reactionary, and doomed view of poetry. On the other, she observes that “we take note of the ‘belatedness’ of this or that poetic text . . . without stopping to consider that it may be the genre itself that is ‘belated.’ ” If the entire genre of lyric is belated, then by implication a reactionary ideology inheres in the genre, and any text identifiable as an instance of that genre could be assumed to participate in its ideology. (197–98; Emphasis in the original)

Jeffreys would have us recognize here that as long as we remain tied to conceptions of lyric that derive from such relatively recent and historically lopsided views of the genre, the depiction of the form as a “nostalgic ideological marker” will inevitably persist (197). As Jeffreys points out, the label of lyric is often assigned inappropriately to poems that suggest other intentions, other kinds of work with different expectations than those generated by the term lyric: My question is whether any ideology, oppressive or subversive, radical or reactionary, can be confidently assigned to a text on the basis of its genre

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or of its proximate fit with a critical school’s generic standards. I contend that a given lyric text, although as inevitably marked by ideology as any other example of language art is, is not inevitably representative of a specific ideology simply because it has been identified as a lyric. Indeed, the very act of writing about lyric as a marginalized or marginalizing genre necessarily trades, implicitly if not explicitly, on an assumption of the transhistorical definability of lyric. The risk of that assumption is blindness to the political and historical dimensions of those texts that do not fulfill expectation. (196–97; Emphasis in the original)

Recasting Perloff’s critique of the form in terms of the genre typification at stake here, Jeffreys provides an important counterargument to the persuasive gloss of Perloff’s assertion that in becoming the dominant form of poetry available through anthologies and other teaching texts lyric has displaced other forms of innovative poetry from the modernist and postmodernist canon. Forward looking and important as Perloff’s readings of contemporary poetic practice have been, then, Perloff’s dissatisfaction with “neo-Romantic lyric” is based on a set of assumptions about lyric writing that needs to be tempered with more skeptical approaches, especially in terms of contemporary work that integrates analysis, critique, reflection with some of those elements familiar to us from lyric writing. The degree to which lyric represents a culturally reactionary genre, inevitably attached to “imperial assertions of self, the programmatic exclusion of otherness or difference, and the logocentric quest for presence” (Jeffreys 197) necessarily depends upon one’s view of the ideological content inherent in any literary form or practice—a discussion that tends to be glossed over in Perloff’s writing on the subject. To claim that lyric is by its very nature ideologically reactionary is to simplify dramatically the complex formations of lyric that together comprise the genre, including Sapphic, neo-Platonic, and metaphysical forms of the genre. Moreover, Perloff relies in her discussion here somewhat heavily on a binary that recalls Leonard Schwartz’s discussion, positioning the static, “I”-based neo-Romantic lyric at one end of the spectrum (represented by such poets as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, and others) and the works of Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, and Language poets at the other. Privileging wordplay, parody, and indirection over lyric subjectivity and the self-absorption proposed by the traditional lyric as she sees it, Perloff’s analysis fails to include the ways in which the neo-Romantic “derivations” of Duncan’s “Passages,” for instance, or the cross-cultural mapping of Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou” qualify in important ways how thorough the “impasse” of lyric has been for poets

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willing to pose alternatives to the impositions of a singularly post-structuralist view of language and poetic practice.4 Strategically investigating what it means to carry lyric forward, the poets represented here qualify in important ways the interiority and subjectivity of a tradition that remains as varied as the poets who work through it. Formally, work by Olson, Duncan, and so on has entailed a decided move away from the short, image-based lyrics of the early modernist period and a shift toward the writing of serial poems that intersect the lyrical, while attaining decidedly polysemous, hybrid structures in the process. The works of Duncan, Blaser, Olson, and Mackey in the long poem suggest a varied and porous reorientation to poems that echo each other in ongoing and multi-phasic formations. The ethics of this work rest in its appeal to public testimony and clarity. Insofar as narrative is maintained, it tends to be the narrative of intertextual relation and the discursive processes of language. The work proceeds along a number of different levels at once, stressing what Joseph Conte, in Unending Design (1991), has termed the “discontinuous and often aleatory manner in which one thing follows another” (3). Exploratory, rather than definitive, the serial works of these writers propose a poetics of indeterminacy and irresolution in place of completion or finality. Duncan’s “Passages,” Blaser’s “Image-Nations,” Olson’s Maximus, and Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou” and ongoing prosework From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate all suggest closural principles reliant less on any preconception of the work’s ending as on an inchoate, procedurally based recognition of temporal repleteness, of the work’s contingency as part of a larger, co-extensive work-in-progress. In this way, as Conte observes, serial writing by these writers “not only disputes the necessity of telos, completion, but [they] also challenge the validity of direct consequence—any situation in which A must follow B” (Unending 54). As I argue here, lyric practice and the reinscriptions of lyric subjectivity such writing entails remain powerful, politically and socially reflexive discourses—even when resisted, refuted, revised—and can hardly be limited to the patterns of the short, “I”-based utterances that have tended to dominate critiques of the lyric as a genre. Indeed, it is axiomatic to my critical endeavor that lyric—as reenvisioned in the poetries of Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, Olson, Creeley, and Mackey—remains a sustaining and sustainable resource, providing both a useful vocabulary and literary context within which future generation of writers can work. In this sense, what we find are versions of postmodern lyric that do indeed “begin in the urge to return the material so rigidly excluded—political, ethical, historical, philosophical—to the domain of poetry” (180). That it does so in ways that are both interrogative of poetic form and exploratory of form’s content and

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constraints remains one of the achievements of much innovative writing in the lyric tradition. III One cannot say, Be as women, be peaceful, then. The hole from which we came isn’t metaphysical. The one to which we go is real. Surrounding a vast space seems boundless appetite in which a man still lives till he become a woman. —Creeley, “Conversion to Her”

These stunning lines form the close of a poem from Creeley’s 2003 collection If I Were Writing This. They underscore in particularly unguarded language one of this book’s key concerns: the relation between gender and its scripts and poetic form and production. Creeley’s attentiveness to these issues goes back a long way, a lifelong meditation on his own subjectivity and responses in poetry, work laden with masculine incentive, difficulty, dissembling, vulnerability, and strains of anger and violence. The “I” as Other, the Other as “I”: Creeley’s iconic geography of self and selves continually registers the cultural placement of masculine and feminine as polar and polarized categories of feeling and Being. As DuPlessis has observed in her acute and sympathetic discussion of this poem: In Creeley’s work, a continuous affirmation of strong polarized gender binarism (or sexual difference), with an extreme sense of largeness and hieratic sublimity and/or female figures, is sometimes coupled with striking images of wounding and loss. This wounding and loss are both exacerbated and cured by repeated addresses to the same sublimity. In this argument, males are “converted” to the female principle by recognizing, as converts or epigones, the Mana (and manna) of these goddesses, and they desire to “enter” them in some way, even together with other men, in order to be inside their powers and to be protected from those powers by the company of male partners. (“The Hole” 15)

DuPlessis’s discussion as well recalls the twenty-eight bathers section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which Whitman specularizes the male

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gaze through the perspective of the unseen woman who “hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window” (36). That movement, a conversion of a different kind, represents access to gender ideology as mutable and mutational, a discourse that both critiques and reifies gender constructs at the same time. In ways that DuPlessis makes clear, Creeley’s rescripting of this scene in his later work represents a profoundly humane effort to interrogate the binary of gender and provide alternatives in poetry to an otherwise fervent binarist thinking about Men and Women . . . Finally there is a possibility that the “common life,” the sheer human about which Creeley talked, offers a position beyond gender polarization. Thus among the thoughts Creeley entertained about gender materials, there are some that involve a few attempts to undo sexual difference, to critique gender binarism, to identify with a wounded woman. (“The Hole” 19)

Insofar as this book is an exploration of different forms of masculinity (the category is itself distressed, meaningful only insofar as one can link this term to conduct, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and so on that emerge through social interactions), it is also very much a discussion of the ways in which constructions (and re-constructions) of gender and sexuality inform poetic practice. My thinking through of these issues is indebted to Judith Butler’s enormously influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Nearly twenty years after its initial publication, this text remains central to our ongoing efforts to rethink what it means to be gendered, how and in what ways gender entraps and liberates any of us, providing a map for behaviors that is continually redrawn. Butler’s nuanced discussion of gender as a reflexive and resistant category of subjectivity alerts us again to the problematic aspect of binaries that, for most of us, remain accepted, given, “natural”: feminine/masculine, woman/man, gay/straight, and so on. Butler’s recognition, one to which I return again and again, implicitly if not overtly, is that gender is a complexity whose totality is never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. An open coalition, then, will affirm identities according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure. (22)

Here and throughout her study, Butler draws attention to the entire range of socially formed attitudes and behaviors that “produce” what we have come to think of as permanent, fixed categories of “man” and “woman.” In so

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doing, she theorizes a space that is outside the bounds of conventional constructs and posits a less directive, far more unfixed construct of person and identity. As Butler suggests: Whereas the question of what constitutes “personal identity” within philosophical accounts almost always centers on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time, the question [in this discussion] will be: To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is “identity” a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notion of identity? (16–17)

Each of these questions has profound implications for my own study, which engages a body of writing intimately involved in issues of identity, self, and the nature of subjective experience. In other respects, my thinking here is informed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s probing analysis of cultural binaries that limit our ability to locate subjective experience across the plane of the human. It’s in her bracing Epistemology of the Closet (1990) that Sedgwick asks us to rethink the ideological and social conditions that give rise to these binaries and allow them to function as blinders to more discursive narratives of experience and expression: The master terms of a particular historical moment will be those that are so situated as to entangle most inextricably and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important definitional nexuses. In arguing that homo/heterosexual definition has been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization (and not merely for homosexual identity and culture) as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class and race, I’ll argue that the now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition has affected our culture through its ineffaceable marking, particularly of the categories secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, natural/artificial, new/old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, wholeness/decadence, urbane/provincial, domestic/foreign, health/illness, same/different, active/passive, in/out, cognition/paranoia, art/kitsch, utopia/apocalypse, sincerity/sentimentality, and voluntarity/addiction. (11)

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Calling for an “antihomophobic inquiry” that would “make certain specific kinds of readings and interrogations, perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and significant form for other readers to perform on literary and social texts with, ideally, other results” (14), Sedgwick ambitiously sets forth an agenda that we can usefully apply to the work of contemporary poetic discourses that, often as not, conceal the workings of gender through tropes and formal vocabularies that naturalize the kinds of binaries cited earlier. To be sure, configurations (not to say critiques) of gender and sexual difference/identity are more pronounced in the works of Duncan, Blaser, Creeley, and Olson; less visible in the work of Mackey, though still recognizable as topoi engaged as part of his poetry’s mythological and philosophical content, for example, the sequestered exilic male and female characters that wander without destination through his “Song of the Andoumboulou.” For Duncan and Blaser, such issues find especial resonance in their identities as gay male poets, working within and through the context of the then-developing postwar gay communities of the Bay area. As Maria Damon has argued in The Dark End of the Street (1993), for Duncan and Blaser the critical issue remained how to integrate gay social identity and male-male eros within a poetic context of holistic idealism. Seeking to bridge the rift created by Platonist separations of Self/ Other, Real/Imaginary would become, as Damon suggests, among the first orders of business: “Rather than the Platonic idea of two unbridgeable levels of being, the Ideal and the Immanent . . . Duncan’s poetry suggests that each person has all ranges of being in him . . . and that that range (‘its animal my angel’) is made immanent through erotic contact with a br/Other semblable” (183; emphasis in the original). Probing the ways in which gender functions for these poets, the understandings they developed of themselves as men and the ways in which the poetry reflects, conceals, complicates, and/or resists those understandings serves as one of this book’s central investigative beams. Chapter one begins with an investigation of these questions through the lenses of poetic career and masculine subjectivity in the work of Charles Olson, one of the central practitioners of mid-twentieth-century innovative poetics. In particular, I wanted to understand here how Olson invested enormous poetic capital in two key relationships at an early stage of his writing career, one with the book designer Frances Boldereff; the other with Creeley. Tracing out the formation of early key poems by Olson through his correspondence with both Boldereff and Creeley, I argue that he managed a highly charged struggle as he siphoned off emotional and sexual energies from his relationship with Boldereff to create the works that define his early

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career as a poet. In his turn toward Creeley, Olson engages the very different but related space of heightened (arguably hyper) and perplexed masculinity, where the propositions of a fierce form of masculine partnering supplant and eventually overtake the connection Olson formed with Boldereff. “Projective Verse,” the key document in postmodernist poetics to emerge from Olson’s partnering with Boldereff and Creeley, achieves its initial momentum in these exchanges between Olson, Boldereff, and Creeley; the frictive, incendiary quality of the essay’s prose comes to us, first, through correspondence with Boldereff, where Olson is notably more modulated in his tone, and then is refined and restaged in correspondence with Creeley, where the essay takes on the more assaultive cast we recognize as “Olsonian.” That transformation from epigone to generational spokesman, that use Olson made of Boldereff and, in a very different way, of Creeley, is the primary subject of my discussion here. Chapter two responds to the issue of poetic career and masculine subjectivity through the very different poetics and poetry of Duncan. Occurring at roughly the same time period as Olson’s pivotal correspondences with Boldereff and Creeley, the San Francisco Renaissance established a coterie of poets (Duncan, Blaser, Spicer), whose projects were in different ways and to different degrees informed by what Bruce Boone has described as the “gay subculture” of mid-century Berkeley and San Francisco. Discussing Duncan’s The Venice Poem as an influential and highly influenced work from Duncan’s early career, I draw special attention to the ways in which this poem served as a kind of filtration pool of gay identification, a way of forming initial contact points within Duncan himself and the gay realm that serves as the poem’s inscribed Other. While the literary ambitions of The Venice Poem are evident enough (at thirty-two pages it remains one of the longest of Duncan’s single poems), its attempt to forge in lyric language and serial form the content of a newly achieved gay subjectivity—working through a number of gender positions in the process (very much in the mode of Butler’s concept of gender asymmetry)—is perhaps its most spectacular achievement. As I suggest, this poem must be read in the context of Duncan’s groundbreaking essay “The Homosexual in Society,” published in Politics in 1944. It’s in this essay that Duncan argued openly and critically for a non-hegemonic approach to gay discourse and community, one that would no longer privilege the ghettoization of homosexuality or what Duncan terms the “cult” of gayness then evident in the bars and salons of New York, San Francisco, and other cities with nascent publicly gay communities. The Venice Poem, in its subtle working-through of the nature of poetic

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identity as it impacts upon and engages gender/sexual identity, offers a material example of the position Duncan took in this and later works: neither codifying gayness as a “unique” and privileged aspect of identity nor seeking to shun its aura of “camp” and masquerade. Rather, Duncan found a way in The Venice Poem to refract gender and sexual identity, allowing them play within a broader discourse of homosexualities. That he did so through the modernist discourses of collage and seriality suggests an appropriation of these formal strategies to a nascent queer poetics that Duncan articulates through his poem. Chapter three extends from this discussion to focus on the public debate in 1965 between Duncan and Blaser over their different translations of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chiméres (1973). As a key poetic text of French Romanticism, Les Chiméres constituted for each poet both a marker of lyric tradition and a representative surface on which to inscribe their vastly different understandings of translation practice. As I outline in my discussion, the sources of Duncan and Blaser’s disagreement were interpersonal, having to do with a rivalry for the legacy of Spicer as much as their concern for the “right” way to translate Nerval; but what was most clearly at stake in this rift that never entirely healed was the very nature of poetic language. While Duncan views the poem and poetic language as operating in a realm of numinous eventfulness, one that “comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity” (Selected Prose 3), Blaser suggests a version of poetic agency and language as translational, a movement reliant on the dialectical operations of an “outside” that informs the poem’s formal development. Where Duncan is concerned with honoring the “original” in a translation that will keep central the particulars of Nerval’s language, Blaser is more assiduously concerned with the transformations of the poetic subject in language that never belongs to him, but is carried over in the course of translation. What we have before us, then, is the product of that transmission, that contact between poet and language, poem and world. It is a view of agency and authorship that finds its fullest expression in “The Practice of Outside,” Blaser’s essay on Spicer. Chapter four turns its attentions to Blaser’s developing notion of a public poetry and poetics through his reading of Hannah Arendt. Focusing on his ongoing serial project “Image-Nations,” I attend to the cosmological and political implications of Blaser’s effort to develop a poetry of public, as in commonly held, knowledge. As I argue, developing a stance of historical recognition in poems that register the disruptions of public life remains the key priority of “Image-Nations,” which would reimage and reimagine those

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realities that inform poetic discourse to the letter. As Blaser suggests in his essay “Particles,” Poetry has moved since early in the century to the inclusion of political content, not because the relevance of poetry can be defined by its political or ideological content, but because the public world is sick and has in many places disappeared for lack of particularity. Nothing is shared and no vision of a shared world is possible. (36)

Suggesting that “we return again and again to the importance of language in its activity of holding on to the world and life in that world” (40), Blaser casts a skeptical light on ideologies of self that would regard poetic practice as merely or insignificantly personal, bound to the signature of the first-person singular. In place of the fictions of an “I” that can somehow escape the forces of political and historical worldliness, Blaser posits a poetry of cosmological content that passes between poet and poem, reader and language, holding open the possibility of reform, renegotiation, and return to public forms of language, to its sacredness and human address, which have been all but obliterated in our discourses of postmodernity. Chapter five continues to explore the connections between subjectivity, language, and poetic form through discussion of “The Song of the Andoumboulou,” Nathaniel Mackey’s serial project in poetry. I begin by focusing attention on the relationship of Mackey’s work to Duncan’s, a connection that occurs most explicitly perhaps in Mackey’s extended essays on Duncan’s poetry in his two collections of criticism, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2005). Teasing out the connections between Mackey’s own developing poetry and poetics, I show how this key affiliation in Mackey’s career helped set the stage for the cross-culturally based “grand collage” of “Song of the Andoumboulou” from his first two collections, Eroding Witness (1984) and School of Udhra (1993). Building off associations with Duncan’s practices as a “derivative poet,” I show how Mackey incorporates multiple forms of language to assert a poetic subject both mutable and transformative; a movement between and among different states of public feeling and acknowledgment. Where Mackey appropriates the tenor of some of Duncan’s heightened, lyric-based language, he also modulates this register through formal investigation of the poetic line as discrepant mark of the poem’s meaning, its reticent and sonorous reserve. If the vatic and

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exhortative is the preferred mode for Duncan, for Mackey the pulsebeat is slower, more regulated, cadenced by a movement across lines that reach out for, but just as often deny, the release they would offer through the creases and folds of linguistic errancy. Rereading the difficulty we encounter in Mackey’s work, I follow his discussion of innovative African American writing to suggest that “difficulty” as a term applied to this work more often inhibits and prohibits our going further to investigate how such work resists, refutes, or otherwise rejects a model of black writing that places instrumental language and performative form first. As Mackey suggests, built into the charges of difficulty or obscurity are assumptions about what African American writing should look and sound like, the ideas of community and black experience such work should ratify and reidentify in the course of its public testimonial to the historical wrongs of slavery and its aftermath. While Mackey’s work is saturated in the historical particulars of the African diaspora, his writing resists easy commodification or consumption as a “report on the one thing African Americans are regarded as experts on—racial victimization” (Paracritical 240). Mackey’s multipronged response in poetry, poetic prose, and criticism continues to exert enormous influence on our ongoing deliberation of poetry’s sufficiency and preserve, its ethical proposition, even as the poet runs the twin risks of “the hubris of an easy gesture of commiseration, the assertion of solidarity through presumptions of suffering only vicariously suffered, [that] vies with the hubris of a callous transcendence of suffering, the narcotizing lure of holding life ‘in no higher esteem than it deserves” (178).

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CHAPTER ONE

“In Thicket”: Charles Olson, Poetic Career, and the Crisis of Cold War Masculinity

you see, you sld know what you do, delivering to me up clean out of the delicate sure fingers of yr mind, such things, & Blake, &, for as much as I can take, crist —Olson to Boldereff, January 18, 1950 There is new work to be done, new work —Olson to Creeley, May 16, 1950

U

ntil fairly recently, literary scholarship has tended to view poetic career as developing largely through the strength, commitment, talents, and so on of the poet. It’s a narrative that’s been made familiar to most of us through biographies of poets, where the arc from visionary ephebe to master seems to occur in isolation from other cultural, institutional, publishing, and ideological frameworks. Lawrence Lipking, in his The Life of the Poet (1981), a study of how poets from Virgil and Dante to T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell began and concluded their careers as poets, links the narrative of the isolated lyric poet to its attendant construct of

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greatness or genius, without which of course we wouldn’t care about the beginnings or endings of these careers. Lipking observes: Most of the poets discussed in this book share a common creed: a faith in greatness. Their ambition is less to write individual great verses than to become great poets by achieving great poetic careers. Such ambition may well induce a common uneasiness or even hostility. No poet likes to be accused of “careerism.” Indeed, for many poets the rejection of anything that resembles a career has always seemed the epitome of poetic virtue. (xi)

Later, in his discussion of Keats’s early career following his writing of “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” Lipking describes the quintessential scene of Romantic self-discovery: The true author of the poems is not the man himself but the Genius of Poetry within him and around him. Keats regards “Keats” as a presence radically indifferent to immediate personal concerns. A young poet must be ready to hazard everything, even his life. The future will forget all facts excepts those the poet has put to use. (6)

If this version of the origins of poetic career seems quaint and out-of-date from our cultural vantage point, one must remember how influential such models of reception still are, both in and outside the academy—and how resistant readers and critics alike have been to shifting discussion to the ways in which poetic career remains a deeply entangled process, one enmeshed in a network of social, institutional, and communal forms of cultural production. That Lipking draws on a cultural narrative whose forcefulness relies on its rendering of a coupling of poetic genius and canonicity isn’t surprising, when one takes into account the monumental ways poetic career has been narrativized as singular, iconic, unfolding in the ether of Romantic greatness. In recent years, critics such as Walter Kalaidjian and Libbie Rifkin have attended in particularly telling and resourceful ways to the development of poetic career as linked to social, political, and cultural pressures inseparable from the poetic texts that are produced in their wake. In his Languages of Liberation (1989), Kalaidjian provides a cogent counter to the de-socialized narratives of lyric production that have tended to absorb all discussion into a New Critical model of reading in which “poetry enjoys an aesthetic autonomy from its institutional infrastructures; the ‘ideal reader’ transcends heterogeneous interpretive communities; and

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the private lyric voice dwells apart from history’s social text” (13). Indeed, as Kalaidjian shows, the effective result of New Criticism’s dominant dispensing with any and all extra-textual discourses in considering a poetic text was to separate poems, their writing and circulation, and the careers of the writers as irrelevant concerns that bore no relation to “poems as autonomous and hermetically insulated verbal objects” (6). Stripped of their ideological, institutional, and political underpinnings, poetic practice and poems were separated as well from those critical discourses that established poetic careers through anthologies such as Cleanth Brooks’s Understanding Poetry (1938; revised editions 1950, 1960, 1976), and critical texts such as Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), R.P. Blackmur’s The Expense of Greatness (1940), and Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949) (Kalaidjian, Languages 5). While Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry (1960) played a crucial role in providing a forum for writers in the contemporary idiom, such as Duncan, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, and others, and “legitimated a strong counterpoetics to the New Critical formalism then dominating the American literary scene,” the anthology relied for its critical force on a heavily antiacademic stance (thus valorizing the very foundation it sought to dismantle) and a surprising resistance to the “broader, ideological investments and effects of their own formal choices” (Kalaidjian, Languages 6–7). Defining the “new” field in the absence of a more concerted critique of the ideological and institutional forces at play limited, to some degree, the ways in which this initial grouping of avant-garde writers could effect a more fruitful response to the schism between poetic practice, theory, and poem set in motion by New Criticism decades earlier. In Career Moves (2000), an extremely useful examination of the poetic careers of Olson, Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan, Libbie Rifkin suggests that only by examining more closely the interwoven strands of cultural, historical, and interpersonal relation can we begin to loosen canonicity’s grip on the analysis of reception by reconceiving the stakes of literary exchange in the narrower terms of the poetic career. A focus on career over canon enables an examination of institutions from the interested perspective of particular, historically situated individuals, and it allows for an understanding of the poet’s “duty” that includes Eliot’s bid to “extend and improve” the language, but is also responsive to local material, ideological and social demands. (6)

Aware of the silences, gaps, and fissures that punctuate histories of poetic career, wayward accounts that so often drift back to the model of poet

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outlined by Lipking, Rifkin’s analysis offers a new turn in the study of contemporary avant-garde poetry by providing a sobering account of “the interlocking set of textual and historical factors” that limn the writing of any single poem, the development and engagement of any single working poet. “Poetic careers,” Rifkin reminds us, “are both produced by and productive of this larger social texture” (ibid.). In this chapter, I focus on an early period in Olson’s career, one involving three central figures: the poets Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, both of whom Olson came to know through correspondence in the late 1940s; and Frances Boldereff, who became Olson’s lover and initial recipient of and respondent to draft versions of many of Olson’s most important early poems, as well as his now-canonical essay on poetics, “Projective Verse.” Much of what follows in my discussion here is told through the letters and drafts that went back and forth with increasing urgency and frequency between Olson and Boldereff, and shortly thereafter between Olson and Creeley. Duncan is the less influential presence here, but here too Olson’s stance is indicative of the high octane mix of poetics, male bravado, gendered power relations, and career formation that mark this startling period in Olson’s life. Indeed, one might suggest that Duncan and Boldereff fall off as signally important figures of poetic address (one a gay man, the other a woman), as Olson found the perfect ear for his tutelary instructs and brash insistent “push” in his brother-in-arms, Creeley. In drawing these elements forward, I rely primarily on the two indispensable collections of letters that dominate the Olson archive: the first and most voluminous is that between Olson and Creeley, at ten volumes surely one of the preeminent and most intensively “personal” documents of postwar American poetry and poetics. These letters, written between 1950 and 1952 (where volume ten of the correspondence ends) trace Olson’s and Creeley’s early efforts in poetry and prose, as they sought to establish their footing as writers. The second collection, between Olson and Frances (Motz) Boldereff and dating from late 1947 through the summer of 1950, sharpens in pivotal ways our understanding of the period that Olson termed “a riot in my soul” and that saw a paradigmatic shift in his thinking about poetry, the practice of his craft, and the feminine principle as both ideal and fact of consciousness. While Olson’s letters to Creeley are important in their own right as documents of postwar American poetry and cultural thought, the letters to Boldereff suggest another, in certain ways more complicated (though no less culturally saturated), context: that of the lover and brother cum suitor, the poet as passionate admirer and mentor, working in collaboration with his muse under the sign of Eros. It is in this latter correspondence that

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we see Olson exploring his own newly discovered sense of poetic purpose and authority through an exchange with a woman who not only believed in the significance of his project and lost few opportunities to remind Olson of his potential to change the face of American poetry, but who remained in key ways a champion of Olson’s soul, a mate, muse, and nearmythically providential figure. Where the letters to Creeley suggest the combativeness and insistent self-positioning of two men struggling to place their mark on the cultural consciousness, those to Boldereff suggest another, interwoven aspect of this struggle. For in ways that the letters between Olson and Boldereff recapitulate in stunning detail, the lines between his aspirations in poetry and their relationship as romantic partners quickly became blurred. If Boldereff saw in Olson the potential for genuinely “new” American poetry and viewed it in some respects as her responsibility to supplant this project through direct contributions of her own (and the fusion of the intellectual and erotic projects is one key element in what happened here), Olson it would seem soon came to feel that he needed Boldereff as much for the intellectual instigation she provided as for her emotional courage and resiliency. What Boldereff provided in the way of both real intellectual work and psychological support can’t be underestimated. Hers and Olson’s relationship began, it must be remembered, during a period of great personal anxiety and doubt for Olson. With his Melville book, Call Me Ishmael, behind him and a chapbook of poems, Y & X, en route to being published, Olson was in the midst of a critical period of inner reformation and reorienting, a period that would in turn see the writing and publication of “Projective Verse,” and such early poems as “The Kingfishers,” “The She Bear,” and the first “Maximus Poems” (“I, Maximus of Gloucester, To You” appeared in the inaugural issue of Origin in 1950). Matching Olson’s intensity and intellectual prowess each step of the way, Boldereff would have an enormous impact on his thought and work at this early point and in the years to come, long after their relationship had cooled. It is, of course, accurate to say that here we have, as Marjorie Perloff notes in her book jacket comment for the paperback edition of the letters, “a window on Olson before he became Olson . . . an intimate, arresting portrait of the artist in the process of becoming.” But it’s also the case that this nascent Olson comes to us through pages of letters that are in themselves documents of the genius, not of a singular individual, but of a relation between two impressively gifted and decidedly interconnected personalities (the same, it should be added, holds true for the Olson-Creeley correspondence). Depicting not only a particular moment in Olson’s career, the

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letters between Olson and Boldereff and Olson and Creeley document in telling ways the formation of one key nexus of the American postwar avant-garde, and suggest the potent ways in which, played out in both sets of correspondences, pivotal “decisions—both individual and collective—[about how to] participate in the same set of struggles on the field of culture” (Rifkin 7). More to the point, by focusing on this limited period in Olson’s career, we have a window not only on Olson before he was Olson (and Creeley before he was Creeley), but on the ways in which Olson sought to gain the kind of cultural power that would “make those decisions matter—the accumulation of enough social capital not only to register one’s presence in a particular collective consciousness, but to define the rules and norms of the shared space” (ibid.). As Sharon Thesen clarifies in the introduction to the correspondence, the letters between Olson and Boldereff document in telling ways the range of contributions Boldereff made to Olson’s thinking at this early stage of his career—contributions, it might be added, that fomented in discernible ways the poet’s conception of himself as a player on the larger field of American poetry: It was Boldereff who introduced Olson to the work of Samuel Kramer on the Sumerian sources of the Gilgamesh myth; Boldereff whose letters often provided words and images for Olson’s poems; Boldereff who helped formulate the notion of what he came to call the postmodern, a way of reclaiming the vitality of “directness” (13 January 1950) of a worldview Boldereff called the “unHebraic” (14 March 1950) . . . Boldereff who encouraged Olson in the notion of a poem as a construct of energy and therefore Boldereff who stands behind the ideas in “Projective Verse.” (Olson and Boldereff xv)1

As the volume of correspondence collected and edited by Thesen and Ralph Maud suggests, our perceptions of Olson must be revised in light of the complex interchange that the Olson-Boldereff relationship represents. For beyond what Olson “took” from Boldereff—emotionally, intellectually (a debt that still goes unacknowledged in much of the scholarship on this poet)—it’s also clear that both were willing and intellectually matched partners in a romance that was, first, lived out primarily in the letters they wrote to one another; and that, second, their relationship exerted a considerable psychological toll on Boldereff, while providing a vital (erotically charged) space of writing for Olson—whose own poetry and career remained a consuming (in all senses of the word) topic of

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mutual concern. This is not to say that Boldereff saw herself as without choices in the face of the large claims Olson made on her attentions; far from it. But it’s clear from the letters that passed between them that the dynamics of their relation depended to a large degree on Boldereff ’s passionate enthusiasm for Olson as both poet and man. This is important to remember in light of the shift that occurs at the point where the published correspondence between Boldereff and Olson tapers off, and Olson begins corresponding with the other member of his “company of love,” the young Creeley. “I want some day to see you,” Boldereff writes Olson in October 1949 (a few weeks before they would actually meet at the Forty-Second Street entrance of the New York Public Library in Manhattan), “but I can not say how important it is that you go on being alive—that you do not stop writing—(I am trembling so terribly I just can’t hold the pen) I mean there is nothing if you can not write America can not be—” (Olson and Boldereff 50). For a relatively unknown and as yet untested talent, such language did more than provide encouragement. It gave formative weight to the push that “Charles the sohne” (53) needed to clarify his means, to set out. I In 1947, Olson, then thirty-nine years old, encountered two individuals who would quickly become central figures of his “defining company,” to use Creeley’s apt phrase. He met Duncan first, while on a trip to California to do research for a projected book on the American West. Duncan, who had recently completed writing a collection of poems titled Medieval Scenes with fellow San Francisco poet Jack Spicer, was then at the forefront of the Bay Area poetry scene and what has come to be known as the first Berkeley renaissance. Olson wouldn’t actually meet the second, Boldereff, in person until the fall of 1949. But in 1947, he and Boldereff, a book designer then living in Woodward, PA (Olson would consult Boldereff early in their relationship on the design for Y & X ), began an exchange of letters that would lead two years later to their becoming lovers. Olson, who at the time was living with his commonlaw wife, Connie Wilcock, courted Boldereff with an extraordinarily active and passionate correspondence (sometimes three letters a day) that would in time nearly rival that which Olson began the following year with Creeley. In April 1950, Olson started corresponding with the younger writer who had dropped out of Harvard in his final year to pursue a career as a novelist and short story writer. Creeley, then living on a

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farm in New Hampshire and earning a subsistence level income raising chickens, had been working hard to establish a mode for the early prose work that would go into his 1954 collection, The Gold Diggers. Creeley’s effect on Olson’s thinking and lifework was similarly decisive. Olson’s letters to Creeley demonstrate the range and impact of a relationship that, along with that shared with Boldereff, would absorb his emotional and intellectual energies and become vital aspects of his production as a poet and scholar. These letters, of which Olson had said, “Creeley and I have engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my life” (Olson and Creeley 1980, V.1 ix), in fact served as an extraordinary prelude to the face-to-face encounter between the two men that finally took place in 1954 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—four years after Olson’s initial April 1950 letter. In what follows I want to investigate the interwoven elements of Olson’s relationships as pivotal occasions of intellectual, psychosexual, and poetic development at the starting point of his poetic career. In this sense, incipience, the threshold experience of authorship, is very much my subject here. Particularly important to chart are the ways in which Olson experienced his own push at a point still far from what could arguably be called “mastery.” In looking at “Projective Verse,” a career-making essay for Olson, and two early poems, “For Sappho, Back,” and “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” I explore how his interpersonal relations with Boldereff, Creeley, and, to a lesser extent, Duncan helped underwrite many of the key moves Olson made in his writing at the time. Some questions related to this line of inquiry include: How did Olson, who at the time of his first meeting with Duncan had produced no signs of the poetic output, move from a place of tentativeness and uncertainty to the recognizable Olson of “For Sappho, Back,” “La Preface,” and “The K,”? In what ways did his intense “partnerships” with Creeley and Boldereff serve to forward his evolving projects in critical and poetic production? How does the overlap of these pivotal relations provide another context for our understanding Olson’s output during these critical, formative years of his poetic career? This last question in particular, loaded as it is with cross-references to the lives and written documents of those on the scene at the time, suggests the necessity of an approach that brings together a close critical reading of the poems with an attention to the details of Olson’s life circumstances at the time of their writing. What surfaces from a careful examination of the biography and its related materials are central connections between Olson’s work as a poet and his intimate (yet poetically backgrounded) relationship to Boldereff, a relationship that until recently has been considered relatively tangential to Olson’s procedures and development.

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A second, and intricately connected, aspect of my discussion here relates to Olson’s responses to Creeley and Boldereff as each of these figures influenced and helped transform Olson’s own developing articulation of masculinity. For this I will be relying on a number of sources, including Tom Clark’s comprehensive biography, Charles Olson: Allegory of a Poet’s Life (1991), as well as correspondence, interviews, and other extant archival material.2 Using the biographical context of these materials, I argue that the work that Olson produced during late 1940s and early 1950s and the different literary forms through which he sought to define what became “new” in American poetries ca. 1950 (manifestos and essay, poetry, correspondence) depended to a great degree on his complex negotiation of his own evolving perceptions of masculine subjectivity. Some of this work took place in private correspondence, later bleeding into the poetry and poetics in startling and chastening ways. Far from having little bearing on the work itself, Olson’s protracted assertions of masculinity were fundamental to his leap from epigone to Maximus. The letters to Creeley in particular evince approaches to masculinity that, from our vantage point of the early twenty-first century, may seem almost arcane in their continual swerving from tough-guy mannerism and patristic directive to considered intimacy and affection. Yet the emphasis on the “projective” male self that emerges from the letters to both Creeley and Boldereff—on the establishment of a center, a single (manly) position from which to speak—has much to do with Olson’s (and Creeley’s) need to find a context for their masculinity in a cultural setting that, if not hostile to their kind of man (anti-corporate, ambiguous in their claims to “real manhood”), could find little use for them (short of the universities that both men rejected; Olson too had left Harvard before completing his PhD in American Civilization). As Robert Corber has noted: Masculinity remained a contested terrain throughout the postwar period. Some middle-class men registered their opposition to the reorganization of masculinity by refusing to settle down in the suburbs and raise a family . . . Still other men fashioned an oppositional form of masculinity from different aspects of the beat movement, rock ‘n’ roll music, and African-American and working-class ethnic subcultures. (Homosexuality in Cold War 8)

In this sense, both Olson’s departure from the quasi-public life of government work and Creeley’s establishing of himself as a chicken farmer in Cornish, New Hampshire, constituted culturally oppositional options for two Harvard-educated, white males of the 1950s. That both Olson and

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Creeley were potently avuncular spokesmen for a straight male ethos didn’t lessen for a moment the pressures the culture exerted on them to conform and perform as part of an entire class of white, heterosexual men of the 1950s. If Creeley’s early fictions respond to this crisis by depicting men and women in various stages of relational discord, a staging of heterosexuality and marriage as domestic rancor (e.g., “The Unsuccessful Husband,” “Jardou”), Olson’s poetry registers a dis-ease with both femaleness and maleness as fixed positions of consciousness—while seeking solace in the reassurances of “my drum, whose lustiness / was not to be resisted” (Olson 1987, 83). The “genitalization of performance” cited by Michael Davidson serves to underscore the laboring after-effects of Olson’s initial forays into poetic production, particularly as reflected in his groundbreaking essay “Projective Verse” (Davidson, Guys 33). I want to suggest here the central role that Olson’s developing and conflicted understanding of his own masculinity plays in his development as a poet.3 It’s impossible to read “Projective Verse,” a central essay from this period, without becoming attentive to the enormous pressure exerted by tropes of manliness, of use and method as coded terms for appropriately performed masculine endeavor. Nor, in “For Sappho, Back,” “Hymn to the Word,” “A Lion upon the Floor,” and “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” can one ignore the way that femininity is being fashioned—relentlessly so—made to function as a reflection of male ambition, prowess, assertiveness, and mastery. Clearly, as one of Olson’s poems from the early 1940s attests, the vocabulary and sensibility we associate with his later hyper-masculinist statements and poetry had already heavily inflected the poetry: Lock and bite suck and tongue fuck and bunt cock and cunt O

The language here is compelling in its associative imagery of male violence, sport jargon (“bunt”), and manly display (“cock and cunt”), all of which terminates in the open “O” that is a terminal signal of incipience and, fittingly, also the first initial of Olson’s last name (Collected Poems 8). From our retrospective vantage point, Olson’s push in writing seems from the beginning to have been that of a major force. One reading of this period in the poet’s career suggests that Olson became Olson because he had to become Olson. Yet it’s important to understand how his gestures of

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self-assertion and braggadocio are in themselves readable signs of cultural stress delivered back to us in the form of a lyric signature. It may be circular to state matters this way, but in part our successful engagement of this work depends upon both a critical participation in and appreciation of the gender-coded incentives of this poetry. As readers we are involved in what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has aptly described as a “hermeneutic circle” that is both dizzying and daunting (“Manhood”), as we try to unpack and respond to the gender-coded incentives of a poetry that suggests equal amounts of cultural transgression and gender performance. As with Whitman, whose emphasis on the male body as prima facie condition of writing Olson shared, one cannot easily stand outside (or inside) the masculinist context of Olson’s poetry: that is, a reader is either seduced by the language and enacted mythos of manhood or is likely to feel excluded by the exhortation of masculinity flowing out of the text (that certain women readers might be more likely to find Olson’s posturing harder to take than men doesn’t alter the way in which his writing inflicts its authority in such a way that its intended audience or “company” remains insistently male—and a particular kind of man at that). Another way of stating this would be to invoke the well-known (and equally well-worn) dictum from “Projective Verse”—“Form is never more than extension of content” (Human Universe 52)—by which one could also say: Olson’s form extends directly from the masculinist content that provides its center, its base. An appreciation of the former necessarily involves a complex apprehension, if not acceptance, of the latter. II Since its initial publication in Poetry New York in 1950, “Projective Verse” has achieved an arguably canonical status as perhaps the key statement of mid-twentieth century avant-garde poetics. Carving out a space of primogenitive ordering, Olson conceives himself here as the father of a new line in American poetry. At least part of the appeal or seduction of Olson’s rhetorical approach—for Creeley, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and others who came under Olson’s spell at the time—lay in the muscular tone of Olson’s language; what Blaser has referred to as the “jectives” of Olson’s rhetorical style (“Minutes” #8 6). At the same time, Olson’s manifesto represented a distinctly instigatory call to arms in the face of the cultural complacencies and literary rigor mortis of the period. As one index of where things stood poetry-wise in 1950, one need only take a glance at some of the top prize winners in poetry for that year: John Berryman (American Academy of Arts and Letters),

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Theodore Roethke (John S. Guggenheim Foundation), Gwendolyn Brooks (Pulitzer), Richard Eberhart (Harriet Monroe Lyric Prize), John Berryman (Levinson Prize), Richard Wilbur (Oscar Blumenthal Prize), e.e. cummings (Harriet Monroe Poetry Award), and John Crowe Ransom (Bollingen Prize). With the exception of Brooks and cummings, two poets who challenged in different ways the reigning orthodoxies of postwar American poetry, the list represents the bulk of what was viewed by both the mainstream press and the academic critical establishment as important and vital. In this and other respects, Jed Rasula’s observation has particular relevance to the excitement (in certain circles, at any rate) that surrounded the initial publication in the fall of 1950 of Olson’s “Projective Verse”: “The poetry establishment that seemed so secure after World War II was a refined but precarious meritocracy, able to sustain the pretense, for a time, that the narrow circle of its initiates were producing the canon of ‘American poetry.’ ”4 As Duncan comments in a similar vein in his 1969 interview with Bowering and Hogg: “It’s hard to recapture, to tell you about what it was like in 1950 to have something actually happening in poetry, because nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing had been happening in America, nothing at all. It had been a period dominated by vast and inert mediocrities” (n.p.). In her 1973 essay “Charles Olson and the ‘Inferior Predecessors’: ‘Projective Verse’ Revisited,” Marjorie Perloff has provided a useful corrective to the impression—fostered, to a large extent, by Olson himself— that “Projective Verse” represented a wholly original step forward in American poetics.5 As she suggests, “Projective Verse” wasn’t so much a bold new departure as “essentially a scissors-and paste job, a clever but confused collage made up of bits and pieces of Pound, Fenollosa, Gaudier-Brzeska, Williams and Creeley” (295–6). While its centrality to the formation of Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry remains indisputable, Perloff has a point that part of the genius of Olson’s essay was that it stirred up a pot of avant-garde poetries by providing a provocative instance of power-grabbing. If the document can now seem, as it did to Perloff in 1973, a mess of borrowed influences from modernism, there’s no question that Olson’s genius lay in his staging of what Alan Golding describes as “a (re)definition of poetic form as immanent and processual; a poetics of dailiness and of the personal (as distinct from the confessional); and a poetry of humor and play (as distinct from wit)” (180–1). In short, “Projective Verse,” like Pound’s “A Retrospect” before it, cleared a lot of ground, quickly. And for Duncan, Creeley, and others on the cusp of the alternative poetries of the 1950s and 1960s, this

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document was, to use Olson’s phrase, “sitting there, for use” and helped engender a movement (or movements—as various poetic camps took up Olson’s challenge), allowing a collective place to stand where none had seemed possible before. For poets of the next generation, the effects are still being felt, if tempered by a more critical recognition of the essay’s problematic cast—one that, nonetheless, allows for acknowledgment of the various breaks from business as usual Olson’s call represented. As DuPlessis has observed, Olson’s essay signaled “an epochal shift in poetic practice: the invention of a post-humanist practice of line break and the forwarding of a kinetic text (‘composition by field’) which represented gestural processes of thought” (“Manifests”, 13). In this regard, Olson’s activity and the momentum his essay provided to an entire range of avant-garde American poetry and poetics (including Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, and Black Mountain) need to be appreciated for the cultural work they accomplished. Both a manifesto with clear predecessors (Pound and Williams among the two most notable) and an attack on the hegemony of New Critical approaches to poetry and poetics (lavishly represented by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s anthology Understanding Poetry, “Projective Verse” was a call to the citizens of the Republic of Poetry (whoever might imagine themselves thus), with decided emphasis on Olson’s small coterie of fellow (male) poets.

III Men have their proper season, and that season its act and image, image more than act, a rhythm more than image or than act, proper to them. —“The Advantage” (Olson 1949)

An early draft of “Projective Verse” was enclosed in a letter to Boldereff in February 1950. In his letter to her, Olson indicates that “there are several changes, but they are mostly to take the bristles out, to formalize the treatment. So you must just regard the meat of it, and take it, as it is in the mss., much as a letter” (Olson and Boldereff 1999, 162). Indeed, Olson’s marking of this early version of his essay as itself a “letter” looks ahead to “Mayan Letters” and “The Gate and the Center,” portions of which were

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drawn almost verbatim from letters to Creeley. Moreover,” Projective Verse” is very much a collaborative work, created through correspondence, through a collaboration that relies as much on Boldereff ’s presence as an auditor to Olson’s formulations of a new prosody in American verse, as on Creeley’s contribution as fraternal recipient. It’s important to note that in “Projective Verse,” the male sources of Olson’s key precepts (for instance, Pound, Creeley, Dahlberg) are cited in the text. Boldereff is not. Again, it needs to be stressed that Olson’s motives for failing to mention Boldereff anywhere in the extant correspondence and published essays have a number of interwoven motivations. It would be unfair to suggest that Olson was operating out of a purely selfish and sexist mindset when he erased one of the main contributors to his thought from mention in the work itself. Yet, even allowing for the extreme difficulties of his personal circumstance (conducting an affair in private while maintaining public silence about a key participant in his growth as both a poet and a man), Boldereff remains a curious lacuna in Olson’s public writing from this period—a woman whose intellect, one could argue, had a similar impact on him as that of another female writer, Jane Harrison, whose writings on Greek mythology and early Greek culture were foundational to Olson’s work. Of course, the latter was an established historian of Greek culture and mythology, while Boldereff remained relatively unknown (and unpublished) until long after Olson had died. Nonetheless, Olson’s attributions to Harrison’s thought and writing are pervasive in the essays, with one of his key poems from the mid-1950s, “A Newly Discovered Homeric Hymn,” dedicated to her. Boldereff, on the other hand, is acknowledged only in the private and arguably less available (until now) realm of their correspondence.6 What is also clear now from the published correspondence is the way that Olson’s dramatic statement evolved during a period of increasing emotional crisis for Boldereff, whose own interests in the relationship with Olson (highly complicated, folded into an ardently protective vision of the poet as “God’s chosen”) were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. As she writes in a letter that was never sent: I believe I know several things—one is that you are God’s chosen and it’s my business to go with you all the way—I wish I could see if this terrible struggle I make is of use—I mean of use as pattern—I, like you, am blind—I do not know whether I ask something which is wrong—that is, I am not sure a beautiful thing like ours should not be lived out in actual daily practice— but in the meantime dear I want this message to go to you—because I have been fighting over and over with myself to try to get clear of my own physical

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jealousy and to project forward to you the pure essence of my belief and faith. (Olson and Boldereff 1999, 169)

These are extraordinary admissions, acknowledgments of the ways in which Boldereff felt compelled, on the one hand, to “project forward” a caring (one could say caretaking) role as helpmeet; while, on the other, she couldn’t avoid the deeper emotional conflicts that such a role forced upon her. For his part, Olson wasn’t unaware of Boldereff ’s increasing frustration with a relationship that offered little in the way of the kind of “daily practice” that her letter so clearly demands. Yet Olson’s language in his letters to Boldereff remains suggestively oblique on what exactly he intends to do. baby, believe me, believe me, i am doing the very maximum in all directions the pitch is unbelievable, & inscrutable i never knew i could do so much (for what it may be worth, i should never have been so strong had i not, originally, moved to you, motz extraordinary). (Olson and Boldereff 170)

The insistence of Olson’s plea (“baby, believe me, believe me”) is characteristic of much of his writing to Boldereff, and evinces both an apologetic and overweening desire to assuage a situation he felt he was quickly losing control of. It is no coincidence that Olson should have been, in his more public statement on poetics, so concerned with a term that appears in Boldereff ’s unsent letter: namely, use. As Olson writes in the closing paragraph of his February 12, 1950, letter, a revision of a paragraph that he would later include in the final version of “Projective Verse,” “It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence” (Olson and Boldereff 167). In ways that Olson’s decidedly unsettled stance in relation to Boldereff suggest, he was being forced to work out his “relation to nature” on two fronts simultaneously: his personal involvement with his muse and sister, “Motz,” and his poetic manifesto of resurgent (manly) energies. At the top of the draft of “Projective Verse” sent to Boldereff are the bynow-familiar upper- and lower-case tags of the essay: an appeal to the visual and spatial economies that had already become such commanding forces for Olson. They also serve as introduction to the poetics-as-salvo approach that Olson had borrowed from Pound, and put to use in his own memorandum. It is an “us or them” strategy designed to co-opt the weak and overcome any

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opposition. Here is the opening section as it appears in the version sent to Boldereff: PROJECTIVE (projectile

(prospective

VERSE (percussive

vs. the NON-PROJECTIVE, what we have had, pretty much (outside Pound & Williams, what a French critic calls the “closed,” the visual verse, the lyric, if you like, the personal over against objectivism, the “private soul,” print.

Later in the draft, Olson follows this opening with a paragraph that would, in the version eventually published in Human Universe and Other Essays (1967), appear in somewhat less informal language as part of the essay’s overall argument: Verse now has become a matter of its instrument, the VOICE. And I am not necessarily referring to recitation, not at all to performance, though this is certainly going to be a matter of some importance. What I am deliberately talking about still is composition, composing verse by voice, by, if you like, musical phrase, but specifically by the rhythms as well as the images personal to the composer. Which sounds like what we have heard before. Only it ain’t. And for one straight reason: that it must be faced, that we have lost secrets of both the physiology of the human voice, and its usage. (Olson and Boldereff 164)

Notable here in this “unpublished” version of the essay are the ways in which Olson was still struggling to shake loose (rather openly) of the marked phrasing of Pound’s poetics (“to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase”). His argument here that “if this sounds like what we have heard before. Only it ain’t,” betrays both the level of confidence Olson had in his ability to convert any opposition by emphasis (“It ain’t”) and the way in which Olson understood his role as pedagogue, bringing up past lessons as new material for another generation of poets. Also embedded in Olson’s circulation of draft material for “Projective Verse” is an interesting issue of public versus private that needs glossing. In so far as Olson clearly intended this prose document to circulate, to be published and serve as a pedagogical tool (much as Pound’s “A Retrospect” had done and chapters from Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book

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sought to do), it is worth noting that by including an early draft of it in a letter to Boldereff he was also signaling (albeit not directly in the text itself ) her contribution and the act of collaboration that figuratively gave birth to the essay. The secret element of this transmission suggests a way in which, by holding the two realms separate (i.e., the private, draft form of the essay, included in a letter to his lover, and the more polished, ready-for-use version Creeley would see a short time later), Olson participated in a carefully managed production of his own literary career (and of the journey he repeatedly made between his worktable and his involvement with Boldereff ). This is to say, he took freely from Boldereff, a debt acknowledged only in private, while otherwise authorizing his literary endeavors at this crucial stage through the removal/excision of that female part that would not be seen by others, notably Creeley—who would soon be receiving draft versions of the essay as well. Olson’s “private soul” was indeed on display here, but so carefully partitioned and concealed within the combinate layers of his relation with Boldereff that even Olson’s effusive gratitude as articulated in his letters to her seems somehow incomplete disingenuous: “One of my secret delights is to find myself suddenly not just using Motz vocabulary, but the twisting of the mouth, the exact same heat and pressure of breath, the gestures, the works! and finding that it makes people jump . . . what a wonderful thing you are, what a power and beauty” (UCT/Storrs). Without belaboring this point further, I want to emphasize in Olson’s language the entangled discourses of thralldom, erotic impression, and fraternal address, as these helped generate the poetic discourses that retain the residue of the heady romantic encounter conducted off-stage. That materials are certainly gendered in familiar ways, debts are certainly being disacknowledged, as Motz/Muse for a time at any rate served as a primary goad and guide for Olson. It is revealing that in converting the at-times repetitive, occasionally tentative draft sent to Boldereff into the final form of “Projective Verse” Olson used his correspondence with Creeley as another testing ground for the essay’s ideas and language. For it’s in the letters to Creeley that the famous tag phrases—“Form is never more than an extension of content” (originally coined by Creeley and included in a letter from the younger poet to Olson) and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” 7—enter into the essay as formative principles of Olson’s poetics. And, in ways that are significant to Olson’s presentational method, in the draft sent Creeley as a letter dated June 21, 1950, the more measured, tentative language of the

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Boldereff version has given way to what we recognize as Olson at his most avuncular and muscular: The big baby, LINE— it’s the whole damned problem, in COMPOSITION BY FIELD, this keeping of the line PURE: to undo free verse, its shittings, we must hammer each line out as purely as each SYLLABLE, or we’re dead ducks, like the Amygists, or even EZ, when, as so often, in the Cantos, he goes by his will, thinks that it will carry him, he’s so strong. It don’t, & IT WON’T. (Olson and Creeley Vol. l, 126)

In a little over four months, Olson managed to convert any hesitancy or modulation into the hammered-out text that lay the foundation for the version published in Human Universe and Other Essays. If Olson here proposes to “undo free verse, its shittings” (a scatological metaphor that links old-school “verse” with the bowel movement of weaker poets), Olson seems to suggest that making things right again will require physical force, as Olson and Creeley together “hammer each line,” syllable by syllable. It’s not incidental that the transformation in Olson’s prose occurred in a context of highly charged male relations, part of an exchange in which toughness and masculine bravado and assertiveness went hand-in-hand with the literary projects Olson and Creeley were engaging. Olson’s continual need to measure himself against Pound (to show the master up, so to speak) isn’t surprising, yet it suggests the ways in which Olsonian poetics develops as both a counter-punch to weak versifiers of the Amy Lowell variety and a subtle jab at the aging master, whose relevancy Olson doesn’t so much challenge as seek to re-possess. In the psychodynamic pairing of master-ephebe, Olson’s push clearly required not only the imprimatur of the father, but also some clear redrawing of boundaries between himself and such “lesser” forebears as Lowell, slammed not so subtly in the

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reference to the “Amygists”—itself a neat conflation of disdain for the genteel poetry of Amy Lowell and astringent reminder of Olson’s pairing of himself with Pound. If in “Projective Verse” Olson uses “the exact same heat and pressure of breath . . . the works” as his female collaborator, the curious fact remains that the essay stands as one of the more assertively male-oriented documents in poetics written in the last fifty years. Sharply masculine in orientation, the vocabulary jars with its repetition of “man” and the male pronouns “him,” “his,” and so on. As both Davidson and DuPlessis have observed, even when we take into account the sexual politics of the decade, Olson’s foregrounding of the male pronoun remains a startling aspect of this essay (Davidson, “Compulsory Homosociality” 201; DuPlessis, “Manifests” 6–17). Functioning as concentrates of highly gendered material, the phrasing and orientation of Olson’s language suggest a peculiarly emphatic homosociality. Indeed, as Olson formulates it here, the production, circulation, and audience of poetry become a closed circuit of masculine privilege (masking, again, the feminine presence of Boldereff, who vanishes in the mix); it remains a process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is so peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which reader because he is a third term, will take away. (Olson, Human Universe 52)

Like the breath that is always present but never seen, Olson’s rigorous imperatives are present to such a degree that one reads “man” in the statement given earlier—even when the reference is otherwise gender neutral. Describing the syllable as the “king and pin of versification” (53) Olson goes on in a characteristically erotically charged metaphor to posit that it is through the incestuous union of the male mind and female ear that the syllable is born: “the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . . ” (54). Of note here: the mind in Olson’s description is that “force” that dries the presumably wet “female” ear. Beyond the pun on “wet behind the ears,” dryness can be associated with a sort of postcoital (or postpartum) swabbing, a necessary drying-out of the overwhelming (possibly suffocating, certainly compelling) dampness of the (female) body. The implications of Olson’s depiction of the ear as that organ that permits the male mind to get its work done are striking, as

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DuPlessis suggests: Ear is an open orifice which cannot close itself; Ear is obedient to the authority of sound. Ear is feminine and female. Two ways of seeing this: that the man has poised a necessary sister goddess in his space for his uses, or that the man has opened out a new organ on his (creative) body. Men are getting a lot of poetic advantage either way, or both. (“Manifests” 29)

Like the vagina, the feminine ear as well suggests mystery, secrecy, darkness, an unresisting openness. In this allegory of masculine artifice, the activities of the ear are made subservient to the “male” head—a dramatic conflation of physiology and poeisis based on the male model. IV Ezra/ out of Whitman by/ Homeros (Added in margin of letter to Creeley, June 22, 1950)

Creeley’s initial response to Olson’s budding friendship with Duncan— “Why do you bring this lavender into this group?” (qtd in Faas, interview 12)—is not surprising perhaps, the kind of remark that one straight guy makes to another as both reinforcement of heterosexist boundaries and masculine banter. In retrospect, Duncan seems to have understood full well the context of Creeley’s remark, coming as it did in the face of his work from the late 1940s, suffused with exactly the kind of symbolist, purple diction that Creeley and Olson were out to eliminate from contemporary poetry. What Olson actually made of Duncan, an openly gay poet, when the two poets first began corresponding in the 1940s is less clear. Tom Clark’s biography of Olson gives hints as to the kind of homosexual panic that seeps into the poet’s thinking when he was at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. And Libbie Rifkin, in her discussion of the Berkeley poetry conference of 1965, points to the moment when Duncan walked out at intermission and didn’t return to the hall, and suggests the layers of authorial and homosexual panic (blurring into each other) that made Duncan’s departure such an instigatory (and infamous, at least within the circle of Olson familiars) event: Here, as throughout the talk, a certain amount of insecurity underlies the banter between Olson and Duncan—and between Olson and a large portion

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of the Berkeley audience for that matter—sexuality is both a source and a symptom of this insecurity. By 1965, the scales have shifted to such an extent that the professedly straight poet is put on awkward defensive. At the intermission following Duncan’s request [to use the restroom], for instance, Lew Welch asked Olson if he’d like to go “pee” too. “Nah, shit, pee? I never pee,” Olson replied. “That’s one of the only—the reasons why I’m not a queen is I don’t have to pee to prove that I’m a man.” (26)

One would be hard-pressed to find instances of such outrageous behavior in contemporary academic setting (albeit one that quickly became a very unacademic poet’s gathering), though Olson’s jocularity is clearly meant to squelch the more troublesome distinction he’s making here: I’m a real man, you’re not, you’re queer. The gesture is salient and toxic at the same time, and makes one wonder what Olson did make of Duncan ca. 1947, when they began corresponding with one another. At least on the literary level, Olson seems to have been fairly receptive to early Duncan poems, such as The Venice Poem, “Song of the Borderguard,” and “An African Elegy.” In correspondence, Olson praises the poems’ formal accomplishment, Duncan’s management of seriality in The Venice Poem, the musicality of “Song of the Borderguard” as, perforce, instances of Duncan’s appreciable importance as a poet Olson was pleased to publish in the pages of Black Mountain Review. As Olson writes to Duncan from Black Mountain College in a letter dated November 25, 1951, he “waved [‘Song of the Borderguard’] & read it to all i cd lay my hands on the day it came, it is so clearly something fine, & a pleasure for us to publish.” Later, in the same letter, Olson writes, “It is yr perception that moves me. This is yr weight, the beauty, even behind the verse, what beauty it hath is clear, perhaps too clear, it is so unstopped, man of my other sense of reality might say” (UCT/Storrs). Parsing the meaning of “this is yr weight, the beauty, even behind the verse,” one might say that Olson returns here to the familiar script of masculine energy and bodily matter—its weight—as verification of a sublime and beautiful materialism that would seem to occur “behind the verse.” Both “unstopped” and product of a “man of my other sense,” a lot depends here on what you make of “man of my other sense.” Which sense exactly? The phenomenological? Philosophical? Psychosexual? It’s a blurry line, to be sure, but Olson would seem here to be gesturing toward a kind of queer agency at stake in a reading of the poems. In this respect, Olson’s later essay “Against Wisdom as Such,” a response to Duncan’s “Pages from a Notebook,” first published as The Artist’s View, no. 5 (July 1953) and later reprinted in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), provides a cogent glimpse at the ways in which sexuality

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formed a coded, yet foundational element, of the conversation between these two poets. Duncan asserts in his “Notebook” that Here I am, at last, I said. Why who cares now, not I, that I imitate or pretend, or sit a great frog in the mighty puddle of my own front room. Here I need not be mature. I can be wet behind the ears, adolescent indeed. I shall live out my life in this small world, with my imaginary genius, doing as I please. (Selected Prose 20)

In response, Olson writes: I take it wisdom, like style, is the man—that it is not extricable in any sort of a statement of itself; even though—and here is the catch—there be “wisdom,” that it must be sought, and that “truths” can be come on (they are so overwhelming and so simple there does exist the temptation to see them as “universal). But they are, in no wise, or at the gravest loss, verbally separated. They stay the man. As his skin is. As his life. And to be parted only as that is. (Human Universe 68)

Further, Olson responds to Duncan’s statement that “wisdom itself, or at least the cultivation of energy states per se, thrives on secrecy, on sect, and finds its pleasures in conspiracy.” He writes in vehement response: “[The poet] is not free to be part of, or to be any, sect; that there are no symbols to him, there are only his own composed forms, and each one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its creation, not any ultimate except what is in his heat and that instant inn its solidity yield” (69). Michael Davidson, in his discussion of the connection between community and poetics in Duncan’s work, has described the differences between the two poet’s perspectives as follows: The argument between the two men is an argument over two notions of tradition: one as the archaeological (and archetypal) structure of certain dynamic ideas realize throughout history by a few capable imaginations, the other as the open-ended series of variations on a corrupt and corruptible text. Olson’s theory of tradition is recuperative; Duncan’s is interpretive.” (San Francisco Renaissance 129)

Situating the conflict here in historical and aesthetic terms, Davidson rightly suggests a generative fissure in these two poets’ responses to the formation of poetic lore. But I’m more interested here in the highly suggestive homo-texuality of Olson’s response to Duncan’s queer “poet, self-declared

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manqué” (Olson, Selected Prose 20). It’s another example of Olson laying down the law, yes, but his proscriptive reading of wisdom and truth as inseparable from the man—“They stay the man. As his skin is. As his life. And to be parted only as that is.”—raises the obvious question: What’s at stake in this claim? Why the insistence on such boundaries, the dismissal of Duncan’s “wet behind the ears” poetics of blurring, porousness, polysemousness? I would argue that Olson gains a good deal of poetic capital by strenuously injecting into a debate seemingly carried on purely aesthetic lines a mode of social critique that is masculinist at its base and, once again, positioned to ward off any possible threats to the kind of “containment” of self that Olson regards as central to poetic production. “The poet cannot afford to traffic in any other ‘sign’ than his one, his self, the man or woman he is” (69), Olson writes. It’s not hard to draw a line from this comment to Duncan’s insistence on signs as replaceable, interchangeable, playable, and pliable at the same time. Duncan’s mask, “manqué” and moldable to suit the occasion of the writing, certainly suggests a very different outlook to the more stringent instructs of Olson, who repeatedly advances a poetics of “one, his self, the man or woman he is” (an interesting deploying of the male pronoun to cover both genders). Certainly, as Davidson points out, another element of Olson’s response arose from his disparaging attitude toward the San Francisco scene in which Duncan was a major player. Describing the Bay area poetry world as an “école des Sages ou Mages as ominous as Ouija” (Human Universe 67), Olson repudiates Duncan’s “almost cultic sense of group identity” (San Francisco Renaissance 125) at the same time that he not so subtly conjoined Duncan’s poetics a scene whose orientation was decidedly homosexual. As Maria Damon has pointed out, the relationship between poetic community and eroticism was particularly strong among the poets who circulated in the Berkeley scene of the 1950s (142–201). Writers such as Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser lived out their relationships to one anther and to the work they produced in a consciously open, gay community that embraced the camp politics and ethos of the coterie. Duncan, along with other participants in this scene, was part of a literary culture in which “gayness, poetry and community [were] of a piece, coextensive” (Damon 160). This enfolding of homosexuality, poetic form, and communal values stands in stark contrast to those of Olson, Creeley, and others in the Black Mountain scene, a largely male, almost entirely heterosexual grouping of poets. Tracing the ways in which these very different worlds communicated with one another and found points of resistance and correspondence is beyond the scope of this chapter. But I want to suggest that Olson’s interactions with Duncan in this early period recast the omissions of their relation, and help us understand

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more fully some of the ways in which his lack of direct response to Duncan’s homosexual orientation seeps into our reading of these poets’ early careers. It’s surprising, to say the least, that Olson never seemed to have anything direct or specific to say about the homosexual content of Duncan’s work, particularly The Venice Poem, which throws open the door on gay themes, not least through its use of the word “cocksucker.” What, exactly, did Olson make of such overtly homoerotic material? While the answer to this question will have to remain largely conjectural, what does seem clear are the ways in which homosexuality, as both a context through which Olson examined his own sexuality and as a very real fact of life in the cultural mix he circulated through, formed a centrally informing—if not troubling—element of his experience in the early-to-late 1950s. Here, DuPlessis suggests a line of inquiry that allows for a consideration of the ways in which the openly gay poetics of Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, and others in the countercultural vanguard of the period may have affected Olson’s own heterosexist orientation: “There was a forceful pressure from homosexuality on male self-fashioning, on the male imaginary, on the splits and debates about what masculinity was in the 1950’s, given the sensual attention to male embodiment, sexuality, and physicality in overtly gay works” (“ ‘50’s Masculinity” 9). In ways that have direct relation to the formation of poetic career and a stance within an otherwise heterosexist literary culture, DuPlessis’s comments suggest how difficult it would have been for Olson, arguably enmeshed in some complicated inner debates about his own manhood, not to have experienced these forceful pressures as both threatening, on one hand, and intricately involved in his own self-fashioning as “Olson.” We certainly know from Clark’s biography that homophobia (as an internalized and/or outward directed fear of homosexuality) was not a foreign experience to Olson. In 1952, while teaching at Black Mountain College and suffering the strains of marital difficulty that would finally lead to his separation from his common-law wife, Connie, Olson seems to have found himself experiencing the obverse side of his continual courting of predominantly younger male poets, as issues of sexual identity came critically to the fore in his life and writing. Clark’s description of a dream Olson had during this period puts us squarely in the realm of Freudian scenarios of lost sons, frictive masculinity, and homosocial partnering: He dreamed of ambiguous sexual encounters involving male students like Nick Cernovich and a new favorite, Dan Rice, a handsome young apprentice whose “real Western Levis and tough way with a cigarette” made him the epitome of Black Mountain machismo. In Olson’s dreams, Rice turned from adoptive son into an enigmatic and menacing rival blocking the

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frantic patriarch’s access to his own wife’s bedroom. The “passion for men” Fielding Dawson [a student of Olson’s at Black Mountain College] made out in the Olson of these years was driven by a strong, highly sublimated “wish to engage,” to at once befriend and lock horns with other males. (224; Quotation marks in the original)

As Clark suggests, Olson’s perception of himself as possibly attracted to the young male ephebes gathered around him at Black Mountain provoked a high degree of anxiety and an accompanying refusal to confront aspects of his own masculinity implicated in this subtle dance of homo-eros. Certainly the pressures on Olson, as on straight men in general during the 1950s, were to repress (often violently) any open acknowledgment of homosexuality. To do otherwise was to risk being viewed as a failed man; in some senses, not a real man at all. As Michael Kimmel writes in his popular account Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996): The trappings of gender failure were all around us in the 1950’s, and American men discovered what happened to men who failed, especially the sons of men who failed as breadwinners and fathers. They became homosexual, they became juvenile delinquents, they became communists—soft, spineless dupes of a foreign power, who were incapable of standing up for themselves. (237)

Moreover, as K.A. Cuordileone (2000) suggests in his account of Cold War politics and masculinity, the national discourse was dominated by an antiintellectualism that connected left-wing liberalism with male weakness, effeminacy, and, implied if not directly said, homosexuality: The attack on soft liberals who gave in to weakness was part of the oft-noted, heightened anti-intellectual temper of the time. In some quarters the liberal became virtually synonymous with the “egghead,” a carping intellectual weakling who was, according to the writer Louis Bromfield, “over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem . . . surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men . . . A self-conscious prig . . . An anemic bleeding heart.” (521)

Such discourses of anti-intellectual gender panic were part and parcel of a larger debate about the maintenance of sexual norms in the face of social and cultural changes that seemed unstoppable. By the late 1940’s, social, economic, and market forces were encouraging a new current of sexual modernism, often expressed in popular media, that

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bumped fitfully (as the first Kinsey report had in 1948) against an official ideology that insisted on allegiance to the nuclear family and sexual restraint. (531)

That such “allegiance” existed hand-in-hand with images of the homosexual as alluring threat to the status quo shouldn’t, then, be surprising: At once a figure of terrifying fear, buried envy and loathing, he appeared to have many male critics (not yet attuned to the cultural trends that would later sanction a male flight from commitment) seemed ultimately to desire: freedom form marital commitment, ease of sexual relations, and a kind of power over his life that conventional male roles precluded. (531–2)

It’s impossible to judge exactly the influence such cultural forces had on Olson, to know the degree to which he experienced conflicts about his own sexuality and manhood due to the evident strains on normative heterosexuality that Kimmel, Cuordileone, and others have documented. What is clear, though, based on what we know of Olson’s anti-academic (which is clearly not at all the same thing as anti-intellectual) stance, is that Olson could respond with venomous dismissal to male figures who didn’t measure up. In the example of Olson’s own linking of a certain brand of academic intellectualism with weakness and effeminacy, one can glean something of his reactions during the Black Mountain period by examining his encounter with Paul Goodman, a writer and visiting lecturer from New York University who two years previously had openly advocated homosexuality while teaching at the North Carolina college. Olson’s reaction to Goodman was, as both Clark and Michael Davidson have suggested, nothing short of vicious, a full-out attack meant to un-man the “sissy” poet. Following Goodman’s return to New York, Olson responded with this poem “Black Mt. College Has a Few Words for a Visitor”: dear you, dear true, dear clear, your poor dear doom, your going away not rightly used. He’d send you what I send you too, a little reedy Cross pulling feed out a bottle filled with what now rimes with sis (poor Sis who don’t get half a chance by contrast to boys because her tender ender’s such a portcullis it’s good for nothing more than making those fond ones you’d—what do you say? lay bare? o Paul (Collected Poems 268)

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While in part intended as a humorous send-up of Goodman, the poem is revealing in Olson’s direct suggestion that Goodman is a “sissy,” not a real man. With its language of sexual innuendo and gay-baiting, the poem suggests that a woman’s “tender ender” is no substitute for what the “boys” can offer. Olson’s use here of portcullis, a grating of iron or wooden bars or slats suspended in the gateway of a fortified place and lowered to block passage, draws a curious circle around anality and sexuality, aligning the female anus with a barred passageway, while proffering the image of presumably less resistant “fond ones” as pleasuring cohorts Goodman would “lay bare.” In a weird psychological play, Olson projects onto Goodman elements of his own fearful fantasy and dream life of the time—and vilifies him for activities that, to some degree at least, Olson had been processing internally and poetically: Look: us equals, that is, also sons of witches, are covered with cookies dipped in same from your fell poem. It fell, all right, four-footed with one foot short where five were called for—five, sd the Sphinx, confronted with senescence and with you, still running running running from her hot breath who bore you, Hansel Paul, to bore us—all. (169)

As Davidson notes, “These lines say a great deal about how Olson configures homophobia through misogyny, identifying with Goodman as ‘sons of witches’ and subject to Circe-like powers of transformation” (“Homosociality” 206–207). The defining image of “Hansel Paul” leaves no doubt as to where Olson positions himself in this allegory of emasculation and dis-empowerment. Clearly, his choice—as the stronger, virile poet on the scene—is to meet the challenges posed by the Sphinx, solve the riddle of his own perplexities via the masculinist assertions of poetry and poetics. If the poem is a not-so-subtle document of projection and homosexual panic, it’s also an instance of Olson’s attempt to manage the crisis poetically, instrumentally, sending Hansel Paul “running running running” from the “hot breath” of a figure who is at once male and female, masculine and feminine, a crossed-over site of blurred gender. Interestingly, it’s in a letter to Creeley in the year prior to Goodman’s visit that Olson suggests Duncan represents some other formation of sexuality, one that—like Olson’s carefully administered send-off of Goodman—entertains the possibility of androgyny: “The point, on Duncan, finals is that the Third Sex deal is just too goddamned EASY, WEH, for a diehard, axehead, Puritan as me—but where MY structures

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are (out of the sun) just now has me on the hook” (Olson and Creeley, Vol 8, 185). Whether meant as covert reference to Duncan’s androgynous appearance or as an acknowledgment of gay sexuality as another form of subjectivity altogether, Olson clearly feels uncomfortable with the attributes of this “third sex.” At the same time, Olson seems to concede here that his governing doubts have him “on the hook” in ways that remain disturbing and frightening to him. If Olson tended to steer clear of open discussion of Duncan’s homosexuality, we find in their relations as poets the experience of comradely respect and care that Duncan clearly saw as the basis for any connection in poetry. As he would write to Olson in December 1953: What more central love than the disturbance and trembling awakened by each new song; the calling up of one’s own spirit in answer, the still center in the excitement that comes as the poems are comprehended. A challenge. But to the intoxicated mind a more marvelous alcohol—a nourishment. Of my own otherness. My entirely differentness. It’s the coming back to the core of speech—that poetry might be a revelation of the language written by, created by Man—a closet speech wherein one speaks with the vastest spirit—a revelation of language not personality. What more central love than the comradeship in devotion to art? (UCT/Storrs)

Duncan’s language stands in stark contrast to the memorandum style of Olson’s correspondence with Creeley, and suggests as well a forging of public self of poetic language in the reciprocities of “comradeship in devotion to the art.” With its linkages to Whitman, “comradeship” is a shapely and suggestive term for the relationship that Duncan and Olson shared with one another during this period. As described by Robert Strikwerda and Larry May, comradeship among men involves an association and an attachment based not so much on the intimacies of a connection (as would more clearly be the case with Creeley) as on a sense of common pursuits, joint endeavor, and martial engagement: Comrades are not necessarily intimae friends, for they are often bound to one another as generalized others, not in terms of who each one is as a unique member of the human race. Somewhat paradoxically, comrades are loyal to each other not out of concern for the particularity of the individual other, but out of an almost impartial respect for people of a certain

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type or in a certain situation: fellow soldiers, compatriots, coworkers, etc. . . . Comradeship is a deontological regard for a generalized other and, in this sense, is quite different from intimate friendships, which are based on a regard for a particularized other and where consequences and contexts matter quite a bit. (83)

Without overstating the point, I would argue that part of the reason Olson and Duncan forged a long-lasting friendship had to do with exactly these patterns of homosocial bonding most closely resembling comradeship. Olson’s clear respect for Duncan’s accomplishments in poetry and his inclusion of him in the “company of love” suggest that whatever complicated reactions Olson in fact experienced in his connection to Duncan, the center of their friendship always rested on the bulwark of comradely devotion and care that provided a pertinent protection from forms of intimacy that would have unsettled Olson. Duncan’s assigning of “comrade” to his relation with Olson is telling on another level as well. The word in its late Latin etymological root bears within it the multiple puns on closet, since camera (from which comrade is derived) means room or chamber. If language is a closet “wherein one speaks,” then Olson and Duncan would seem to share the same closet: to be closeted together in their work as men of language. While the homosexual valence of closet can’t be overlooked, Duncan’s meaning here harks back to his notion of poetry as a private, sectarian act, a form of intimacy that relies on secrecy and trust between knowing participants. Framed this way, Olson’s masculinity exists in uneasy, but undoubtedly companionate, relation to Duncan’s vocabulary of comradely virtue. If Olson was partly frightened by the perplexing shadows cast by Duncan’s queer poetics, he learned, it would seem, to stand “out of the sun” and profit from the exchange with a poet who remained a central part of Olson’s thinking throughout his career. V judgment is a lie except as we use it only on ourselves. We may do that. This is, is it not, after all, why some of us commit errors, suicide, whatever: the privilege, of ourselves. And value? It better be, better stay, express itself only as, form.

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And those who do not know this, who think, by themselves, by their “sight,” by their—what? the excuse of, their energy?—to pin down another? O may they be damned, damned, damned —Olson to Creeley, July 4, 1950

When we turn to the poems from this period, what becomes immediately evident is the way in which a masculine model of poetic form remains for Olson (and to a certain degree for Creeley also) the implicit first fact of consciousness. By this I am referring particularly to the way poetic value for both these poets seems to emanate from a “stance” toward others that is at once judgmental and appraising and directed at an “outside” whose encroachments must be assiduously warded off by the containments of one’s probative manhood. It’s through the management and appreciation of form—the extension of content, in Creeley’s tag phrase—that the male poet understands how to act in the world, how to achieve autonomy, agency, and authority in the realm of public living. Content (as in the content of a man’s character) remains inseparable from the form or activity of the poet’s being. Olson’s directive here is toward a mode of inward judgment along the lines of Creeley’s earlier proposition—that each man judge his own actions by the singularity of his content. Thus, he becomes free from any judgment except self-judgment. In asserting the value of the individual act, Olson interestingly tethers his commentary to the recursive narrative of gender and, in particular, of Woman as a figure of sublimated desire. As he asks himself earlier in the same letter: Anyhow, value, as judger? ((I am reminded I had this, in a poem, the only thing worth saving, perhaps: behave, lest the outcry shall seize you, for what you have done for her who there lies naked whose body in that place is uncovered, whose breasts there, lie open before you and before the judges’ stare (Olson and Creeley, Vol. 2, 52–3)

This early version of “La Chute II,” written in July 1949 and enclosed in a letter to Boldereff as well is, like “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” another poem composed around self-directives. The previous stanza, not cited in

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Olson’s letter, reads: Go barefoot. Make no sound. And when you meet the wife you loved do not kiss her nor strike the wife you hated. Likewise your sons. Give the beloved one no kiss, do not spit on his brother (Collected Poems 84)

As instruction of (male) selfhood, the language of “La Chute” suggests a mythologized scene of masculine territoriality and authority. That this poem should find its way into a letter to Creeley at the precise moment when Olson is ostensibly involved in a discussion on social and public value shows the degree to which the discourses of masculinity were implicated in Olson’s intellectual and poetic imagination. Moreover, the rhetoric of this poem points to the ways that the boundaries between idealizations of femininity and tropes of masculinity continually blur in the work. The sliding from one to the other—from presentations of gender to poetics and back again— suggests slippages between the incentives of poetic mastery and those of masculine accomplishment. In a highly complicated narrative that combines personal shame (over the pain he has inflicted on both Boldereff and Connie) and issues of poetic form and value, Olson aligns the act of discovering the woman “whose body in that place is uncovered” with the moment of “ACT and/or FORM.” Both a shield before “the judges’ stare” and the inciting figure of primal discovery, the “she” of the poem’s language is put in service of that act necessary to the poet’s—and poem’s— public acknowledgment, its usefulness as an occasion of artful praise and testimony. Olson ends this letter to Creeley—which becomes a sort of restraining order against judgment in generis—by connecting even more directly the discourses of use and value with the narrative of mythologized gender: note: it does seem of certain significance that this is written under the eye of (the photo of) a princess (Totonac?) which I rediscovered in my files today, and have now up on the wall again like a totem of, the sort of thing i am talking about above, the discrimination to believe that taste is given us neither for humility nor snobbery, neither for judges nor crawlers, but for the arrogance of,

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ACT and/or FORM only. She has, in the Mexican sun, a wonderful hole of an eye (it is a profile pix) which is cut precisely as is the Chinese character for a mouth And her mouth, of course, is shadowed so, it is, an eye . . . (Olson and Creeley, Vol. 2, 53–4)

Integrating allusions to Mexican folklore with a reference to Pound’s “Canto LXXVII”—“mouth, is the sun that is god’s mouth” (466)—Olson links the necessary “arrogance” of act and form with the talismanic presence of that goddess under whose watchful mouth/eye he proceeds. That Olson so quickly executes the shift from the female mouth to eye (i.e., the passage from sound and speech to the silence of the gaze) suggests the way in which he was imaginatively and perceptually committed to that “hidden constance of which all the rest / is awkward variation” (Olson, Collected Poems 162). Viewed from this perspective, Woman would seem to have constituted one of the ultimate use values in Olson’s work—as the fortifying presence that quite literally “bore the fruits.” “For Sappho, Back,” one of the key poems in Olson’s early oeuvre, serves as another useful model of the way in which tropes of masculinity and gender formation are consistently evoked in the poetry. Contemporaneous with the writing of “Projective Verse,” and the opening lines of which were drawn directly from Boldereff ’s letters to Olson, this poem can be seen as a sort of companion piece to “Projective Verse.” It offers a subtle enactment of that essay’s thematic of open field composition, a field, one might add, that is scored by gender narratives that are in themselves recits of the Western lyric tradition as emblematized in the allusion to the Greek poet Sappho: With a cold eye, with her eye she looked on, she looked out, she who was not so different as you might imagine from, who had, as nature hath, an eye to look upon her makings, to, in her womb, know how red, and because it is red, how handsome blood is, how, because it is unseen, how because it goes about its business as she does, as nature’s things have that way of doing, as

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in the delight of her eye she creates constants And, in the thickness of her blood, some variants (Collected Poems 161)

In its conflation of Sappho/Frances, the poem provides on one level a nonremarkable rendition of femininity as archetypal figure of Nature/Nurture. Like the ear that is both exposed to the world and conceals within its activity, the womb gives forth its “handsome blood.” Moving between the heightened discourse of the love lyric and a meditation on the feminine sublime, Olson’s text projects the existence of the feminine within the space of the masculine. It is the “intimate, the intricate, what shall perplex forever / . . . a matter . . . not of confusions to be studied and made literal, but of a dry dance” (162), which Olson’s poem and language are at such great pains to draw out. In lush imagery that enacts the gender narrative of woman as Muse, the female figure is described variously as “self-housed,” “limpid,” “forever new,” “tender-taken.” And, in a remarkable sequence that echoes key assertions of “Projective Verse”: look as she passes, on this moving thing, which moves as grass blade by grass blade moves, as syllable does throw light on fellow syllable, as in this rare creature, hidden, each moving thing is light to its known, unknown brother . . . (Collected Poems 161; emphasis added)

As Boldereff had written Olson, “That I am your actual flesh sister I now know . . . That our terrible oneness creates incest, I know . . . our paths so unlike and [yet] the blood-beat so precisely the same.” Olson’s perception, expressed to Boldereff in another letter, that “i am your male . . . yr brother-father, i am strangely the son of, F[rances] m[otz]” (qtd in Clark 171) amplifies the incestuous level of their relation in yet another direction: not only are they brother and sister, but Olson views himself in the serial roles of brother/father/lover to Boldereff. Olson’s figurative reenactment of cultural taboos surrounding incest serves as a potent psychosexual context for both the poetry and poetics (as Olson’s relations with Boldereff and Creeley share aspects of the fraternal), and provides a potent metaphor for the fraught gender relations this work intersects. As an astonishing example of the near-total blurring of the autobiographical, mythological, and poetic realms, the poem works as both a coded message to Boldereff

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and as a repository of key themes that Olson will work out in his future poetry and prose. “For Sappho, Back” suggests a fusion and diffusion, not only of poetic subjectivities (from “I” to “You”), but also of securely bounded gender categories of male and female. However, it is worth noting that in suggesting the possibility of a merge with “her tender-taken bones,” Olson’s poem finally vacates the scene altogether in the lyrically recursive, psychically irresolute image of “a dancer going off.” As poems of incipience go, Olson’s call here is finally indeterminate about what the next stage might be. Nonetheless, the terms as such have certainly been established; inevitably, they will circulate again and again around this figure of she whose “eyes are sign.” Throughout this process of autobiographical and mythic enfolding, the bits and pieces of emotionally charged material from the correspondence with Boldereff serve as serial units of composition within Olson’s poetic text. Transferred almost word for word in some instances from her letters to his poems, Boldereff’s language limns his texts as an unvoiced Other. Assimilated into the psychosexual economy of Olson’s impassioned cry to the Muse, this “rare creature” (Collected Poems 162) that is ostensibly the poem’s focus is not so much erased from view, as she is inscribed deeply into sign-making that draws a figure around gender. In so doing, Olson’s text consolidates culturally dominant and subjectively influential strains of gender formation to enlist the power of the feared daemon and rise to the Orphic heights the poem demands. In another poem from this period, “The Prayer” [later published in A Nation of Nothing but Poetry (1989) as “Lady Mimosa”], Olson inveighs the spirit guide, Lady Mimosa, to deliver us from all mud You who took on the job, keep us at it Lady, to whom it occurred: the very brilliance of my flesh, its form, is enough to lead them out; we follow you (Olson and Boldereff 283–4)

Olson’s beseeching of the Lady to “deliver” him “from all mud” suggests an oblique cry to Boldereff to help him clarify his means, to assist in his search for an “out” as both a poet and a man during this intense period of inner

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turmoil and real-life struggle. That Boldereff “took on the job” seems clear by her response to Olson’s lush introit, though in this exchange both tone and content differ markedly from her usual admiration of and receptiveness to his work. As she would write in a fierce response to this work in a letter postmarked April 3, 1950: I wait like a vigilant enemy—I want it all consumed. I want Olson to step forth without debt—to speak a new image as he did in the letter accompanying… The meaning of your poem is right—I want more violent language—I want more Olson. I want Lady Mimosa speaking aloud to herself— I want the pain I want the rejection I want the door But I do not want sex insulted—I want my Olson to say “how bright of nature to make us multiple”—it has to be hard language full of hard paradox— Oh! Christ what I ask of you— (Olson and Boldereff 294)

Boldereff ’s comments interestingly target those aspects of the poem that sound a false note, either because Olson renders Lady Mimosa speechless (a common enough trope of lyric writing by men) or, more importantly, because of the removal of violence from the poem’s language. In asserting “I want the pain / I want the rejection / I want the door,” Boldereff calls for Olson both to acknowledge his own acts in full—their punishing and violent effects on their relation—and a contrary claim for “more violent language” appropriate to the assertiveness of the poet who may “step forth without debt.” At the same time, Boldereff admonishes Olson for bad faith in a poem strenuously moving toward an image of Lady Mimosa as resource and enabler. To the lines from Olson’s poem “We thank you, / that you made us / as we are” (284), Boldereff ’s response comes back sharp and pointed: “I don’t thank. No female thanks. I hate its guts” (294). In saying “I do not want sex insulted,” Boldereff also seems to suggest that sex exists—female and male—as separate categories, and that Olson is, in this instance, doing a distinct disservice to his sex in a poem that beseeches, yearns, remains lyrically derivative (“I want Olson to step forth without debt “), while being untrue in its statement. The “hard language full of hard paradox” is exactly what’s missing, according to Boldereff, from Olson’s artful but finally disingenuous lyric call. If anything, her rebuke

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lays bare the overdetermined aspect of Olson’s relationship to Boldereff as both respondent figure and muse—guided by ear—and suggests that, while the figure of helpmeet certainly wasn’t problematic to Boldereff, what was simply unendurable to her—“I hate its guts”—was Olson’s position of gendered suasion that didn’t fully meet the terms of his own sexed existence. Those terms, it should be marked, necessarily include “violent language . . . pain . . . rejection.” Like “Help Me, Venus, You Who Led Me On,” and other works of this period, both “For Sappho, Back” and “Lady Venus” are very much poems of incipience, addressed as much to the attendant ear of his muse and helper as to authorizing figures of poetic authority and ambition. As Jed Rasula points out: the male voice of poetic authority is underwritten by a female voice-over: his poem is not so much “inspired” (in the convention to which we’re accustomed) as it is pre-articulated inside him, in a voice that is differently gendered. To experience voice as inner—that, as unvoiced—is to be initiated in the emergence of gender, particularly gender understood in affiliation with genius. (“Gendering” 161)

Read in the context of Rasula’s observation, Olson’s texts enact a complicated “dance” between “that which is the shoot, the thrust / of what you are” and “the hidden constance of which all the rest / is awkward variation” (Olson, Collected Poems 162). The poem, in marking off the female body as a site of intense regard, suggests the text’s status as a poem of beginnings, of incipience. Not admiration of female Beauty or desire for physical union with the Beloved, but this! this is what gives beauty to her eye, inhabitation to her tender-taken bones, is what illumines all her skin with satin glow when love blows over, turning as the leaf turns in the wind and, with that shock of recognition, shows its other side, the joy, the sort of terror of a dancer going off (Collected Poems 163)

Incorporating Boldereff as the silent figure behind the writing—“the part hidden . . . from everyone else”—Olson situates himself and his poem at

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a primal scene of writing, in which the incestuous figures of brother/sister, mother/son, father/daughter produce that “heave within” that is one of the signatures of masculine creativity. In face of the “terror” of losing contact with that portion of himself that holds the Muse within, literally containing that which makes the event of poetic production possible, Olson builds a delicate structure to house this incomplete version of empowering (female) Other, while seeking to replenish those energies that are irrevocably linked to her presence on the scene. “In the primal scenes of Western poetry,” Rasula writes, “the voice-over is female (Muses, Echo) or the voice of the poet is indebted to a vanished woman (Eurydice)” ( “Gendering” 162). What we find tucked within the “other side, the joy,” then, is Olson’s recurring terror that his Dancer/Muse may abandon him altogether, refusing the imprecations of the “accurate kiss” and vanishing beyond the reach of his suddenly diminished vocabulary. If “For Sappho, Back” articulates a simultaneous desire for and terror of the Muse figure, “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” a poem that dates from the same period and was sent initially as part of a letter to Boldereff, revivifies the dilemma of the masculine subject struggling for affirmation. This too represents a poem of incipience, of surging male energy confronting and seeking to move past its limitations. The poem is riven by the anxiety of its male speaker—a “brother” who, like the speaker in “For Sappho, Back,” desires completion through linkage with the “necessary goddess.” Posed as a series of questions, the poem projects a terrain of “underbrush” and tangled wilderness (with allusion to Dante’s Inferno) from which the speaker must rise up to confront the central task of asserting himself. . . . (Who puts this on, this damning of his flesh?) he can, but how far, how sufficiently far can he raise the thickets of this wilderness? How can he change, his question is these black and silvered knivings, these awkwardnesses? How can he make these blood-points into panels, into sides for a king’s, for his own for a wagon, for a sleigh, for the beak of, the running sides of a vessel fit for moving? How can he make out, he asks, of this low-eye view, size? (Collected Poems 156)

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The problem for this speaker, as for Olson himself, is how to measure one’s progress and movement in the world, how to achieve “size.” Visibly dislocated in a nonlinear time in which the implements of preindustrial warfare combine with images of early American wagon trains moving across the West, the poem’s trajectory is “out”—into space—but how to get there, “how trace and arch again / the necessary goddess?” (ibid.). Oscillating between states of profound physical and emotional torment and the bewilderment of a man who needs to ask “Who / am I?” (157), “In Cold Hell” seeks to resolve its fundamental dilemma of masculine self-authorization in a triangulation of female figures: the all-encompassing maternal presence of the Egyptian goddess Nut; the Beatrice-like figure of the Beloved; and common, everyday woman, a “bitch” who remains at the center of daily action. The poem’s coercive discovery, that none of these female figures is sufficient to aid the speaker in the choices he must make, becomes both the grounding force behind poetic (and manly) enablement and doleful commentary on the predicament of the poet’s life circumstances: That it is simple, what the difference is— that a man, men, are now their own wood and thus their own hell and paradise that they are, in hell or in happiness, merely something to be wrought, to be shaped, to be carved, for use, for others does not in the least lessen his, this unhappy man’s obscurities, his confrontations (158–9)

As recounted here, Olson’s familiar themes of self-definition, personal difficulty, and the public usefulness of male endeavor are combined with an astringent sense of the ways in which the “obscurities” and “confrontations” that limn and limit his existence cannot easily—or perhaps ever—be resolved. If women and Woman remain central to this “hell” that the poet finds himself mired in (as they surely are), then Olson seems to suggest that while attaining strength as a man remains the only option, it doesn’t make any less painful the consequences of his ambivalence and torpor. The scripts of agency are curiously mired here in the understanding that no matter that “man, men, are now their own wood,” they are at the same time “something to be wrought, to be shaped, to be carved, for use, for others.” Will, the force of internal and public action, would seem then to face resistance

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and confrontation in a landscape of “obscurities” and unsettled debts. If the rhetoric is inflated in its response to the impress of lyric vocality (with its own troubled gender history), it’s also clear that Olson is here trying to come clean and face the “unhappy man” he’s become, one whose choices are no less fraught for their seeming to present different options, different occasions of use. Both self-instructive plan of inner growth and descriptive agenda for masculine endeavor, Olson’s poem charts a “heroic” path and concludes with an image of the poet and his Muse entering that metaphorical field of human endeavor and action—a space that is never far from Olson’s consciousness: He will cross And is bound to enter (as she is) a later wilderness. Yet what he does here, what he raises up (he must, the stakes are such this at least is a certainty, this is a law, is not one of the questions, this is what we talked of as —what was it called, demand?) (159)

Finally, the choice is that there is no choice; only the “law” remains, with its ceremony of “raising up” a self big enough, powerful enough, to continue. The poem’s concluding lines reveal a careful encoding (as the whole poem has been) of Olson’s personal inability and refusal to make a choice between his lover, Frances, and his wife, Connie. At the poetic level, Olson’s language reasserts his avowed intent to . . . forever waver precise as hell is, precise as any words, or wagon, can be made (160)

Which is to say: the private narrative may remain irresolvable or a situation left for others to resolve (in this case, Frances and Connie), while for Olson

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the inevitable task remains that of the man of language: to define a self and poetic method balanced carefully between wavering and non-wavering, between the forces of stasis and movement. Once this field has been defined (as all Olson’s work from this period is at such pains to do), it “is not a choice, is / as dangerous as a prayer, as a death, as any / misleading, lady” (159). Caught between gendered narratives of activity and passivity, agency and disempowerment, Olson’s poem suggests a complicated middle terrain. Scanning a landscape in which “men did die, where boys / and immigrants have fallen” (158), the poem’s speaker remains lodged deeply in the historical “abstract,” the “cold doing” that marks the road to accomplishment and mastery. In crucial ways, the female/feminine that is the poem’s subverted site of desire and transfiguring sexuality remains part of the underbrush, forever “isolated, observed, picked over, measured” (157). While this move is not extraordinary in itself as a self-legislating moment of masculinist apprehension, important to observe here are the ways in which Olson invests this maneuver in a poem of epic proportion with a forcefulness designed to signal his own incipient status as Poet and Maker. “So shall you blame those / who give it up, those who say / it isn’t worth the struggle?” Olson’s poem asks. As clearly as anything Olson ever wrote, “In Cold Hell” documents the means by which he understood his own struggle to become empowered as a poet, to achieve a force of act. If union with the representational “necessary goddess” finally remains impossible, the poet’s invocation of her must forge a place anew in a realm configured around the primacy of masculine speech and writing. In so far as culturally proscribed versions of masculinity remain at the root of Olson’s poetics, it’s also the case that Woman occurs as the proffered sign of incompleteness and silence. The important point would seem, then, that She remain “of use,” perpetually enfolded in the patterned projections of masculine ceremony and initialing.

CHAPTER TWO

“Homosexual Advertising”: Gay Subjectivity, Modernist Form, and Robert Duncan’s The Venice Poem

Social actions are themselves always embedded in systems of public signification, always grasped, even by their makers, in acts of interpretation, while the words that constitute works of literature are by their very nature the manifest assurance of a similar embeddedness. Language, like other sign systems, is a collective construction. —Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning Don’t say I can’t cast shame off, step out of my trousers an amazed man. Don’t say this isn’t a more lasting pleasure than the struggle for good government or an aesthetic standard. Don’t say the embrace of good bodies isn’t all that I mean when I praise the Sun or its princely powers. I mean the ebullient leaping of naked bodies when I speak of the spirit’s healing. —Robert Duncan, “A Fresh Start” (1947/48)

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I. The Poet as Homosexual Stories told after the fact are often apocryphal reminders of another kind of self-fashioning. When Greenblatt reminds us of the social nature of language as construction—and our identities within that framework as likewise constructs of “public signification”—he takes us to the heart of an inquiry into poetic making. Interpretation that follows the acts of the text predisposes us to a ceremonial affliction: we grasp at the contexts that no longer exist except as memorabilia of a text’s signification. The man or woman who was there is forever absent: a sign of someone we come back to, again. This chapter’s title is borrowed from an interview with Robert Duncan conducted by Ekbert Faas in 1980. In the course of the interview, Duncan mentions a letter Robert Creeley had written to Charles Olson at the beginning of their friendship with each other. Paraphrasing from this letter, Duncan refers to a question Creeley had posed to Olson: “Why do you bring this lavender into this group?” Duncan goes on to suggest, by way of explaining Creeley’s apparent derision, that “the letter was really responding to the kind of over-ripe writing I do. Because the kind of writing I was doing then and have been doing at all times had passages in it that could be called purple passages in the sense of what was used in the pre-Raphaelite period” (Faas, Interview 12). Duncan then relates this discussion to John Crowe Ransom’s outraged reaction to the publication of Duncan’s groundbreaking essay “The Homosexual in Society” in Politics in 1944. As Duncan halfhumorously put it, I have always done a grand job of advertising what my poetry is all the way along the line. And certainly some homosexual advertising is also going on. Homosexuality has always been built into the advertisement. I mean, I could have extricated it from the contents putting it in small letters like: smoke eight packs of this a day and it will make you want to travel. But if that was the message, then I put that in very large letters indeed to let them guess what it was that they were smoking. (Faas, Interview 13)

Duncan’s sense of homosexual content in his poetry as “advertisement” or promotion, a message directed at otherwise wary readers, is a useful way of beginning a discussion of The Venice Poem, the work that more than any other from Duncan’s early period incorporates openly homoerotic themes and imagery, and does so in a complex meditation on materials that range from the intimate and subjective to the literary, mythological, and sociohistorical. Along with Heavenly City, Earthly City (1947) and Medieval Scenes (1950) two other works from Duncan’s early period, The Venice Poem forms

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an important bridge between the earlier, less assured work of Duncan’s youth and the mature stance of Duncan’s later work in The Opening of the Field. Its central position in Duncan’s career stems at least in part from the exemplary manner in which he forged a version of poetic identity identifiable as that of Duncan, one that brought together a consideration of the mythic properties of language; a keen awareness of poetic subjectivity marked by the constructions of gender and sexual difference; and a distinctly exposed expression of life issues that constitute the poem’s figuring of what Michael Davidson has referred to as Duncan’s preoccupation with “embodied passional states and the extreme forms of jealousy and desire that they took” (“Marginality” 292). At the time of the poem’s writing, Duncan was living at 2208 McKinley with a group of predominantly gay writers that included Jack Spicer, Philip K. Dick, George Haimsohn, and Jerry Ackerman, who had became Duncan’s lover during this period. Having recently left the commune-like environment of 2029 Hearst Street—with Blaser, Spicer, Leonard Wolf, and other writers and artists as frequent guests—Duncan had by this time already completed two major works of his early period, Heavenly City, Earthly City (composed during 1946; published in 1947 by Bern Porter) and Medieval Scenes (written over a ten-day period in February 1947; published by Centaur Press in 1950). Work on The Venice Poem commenced in the early months of 1948, and relates to a very specific set of life circumstances within a gay community in which Duncan, at least for a time, circulated. To read Duncan’s work from the 1940s is to recognize the ways in which poetic career and a developing understanding of his own identity as a gay writer living and working in the developing gay communities of Berkeley and San Francisco form a critical part of Duncan’s milieu, his way of writing himself into a history then forming around him. As Bruce Boone has noted in his assessment of this early period in Duncan’s writing career, “The subject matter of these [early poems] is the gay subculture. It’s a writing that is full of conflicts, doubts, self-laceration” (74). It is also, as Boone goes on to point out, the poetry that precedes by only a couple of years Duncan’s meeting of Jess Collins, the painter with whom he would form a lifelong partnership. The self-directed rage and anguished tone of much of the language in The Venice Poem suggests that Duncan began here the passage from one state of feeling and self-recognition to another. The poem registers a separation, a growing awareness on Duncan’s part of the ways in which his own homosexuality and humanist idealism could find expression in a language of conscious, rapt, and rhapsodic awareness, without engaging in sentimental posturing or the camp affect of other markedly “queer” texts. The line

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between the “purple” writing that inflects many of Duncan’s poems from the 1940s and the formal and linguistic shifts evidenced in The Venice Poem is a fine one. Yet in telling ways, Duncan’s growing confidence in his art and vocation as a poet allowed him not only to develop multiple areas of intellectual and personal interest, but to do so through a figure of poetic identity (and intensity) whose roots in the lush language of the Romantics and pre-Raphaelites was joined to a considered rereading of Modernism’s linkages to romanticism. This dialogue between differing traditions—and competing versions of masculine subjectivity—is carried out, it must be remembered, in the social and political space of the 1940s postwar United States, a cultural climate hardly disposed to acceptance of homosexuality in whatever form it took. As Thom Gunn notes, “It is well to remind ourselves how little precedent there was for Duncan’s testimony at that time and in that society. Homosexuality was held in peculiar horror even by liberals who would not have dreamt of attacking other minorities” (143–4). There remained real danger in self-exposure, which makes Duncan’s statement in “The Homosexual in Society” all the more remarkable even at this late date.1 This essay is still startling to read on a number of counts, most especially for its rigorous honesty about the terms of the debate in which homosexuality functioned (as it still does) as a multi-valent sign, separating and bringing together various constructions of gay and straight identities. As Michael Davidson has pointed out, Duncan’s recognition of his own “culpability” in participating in what he terms a “cult of homosexual superiority” helped him gain “a good deal of polemical energy from establishing an apostate relation to what he perceived as orthodoxy” (San Francisco Renaissance 278). It is Duncan’s straightforward refusal to participate in a deft us/them binary that sets this essay apart from other statements addressing the role of gays as a minority community within the heteronormative culture-at-large. Fiercely arguing against the “ghettoization” of homosexual identity he saw as endemic to gay life, Duncan targets those members of the community whose rhetoric and manner further isolate the homosexual in a realm of perverse separateness: There are critics whose cynical, back-biting joke upon their audience is no other than this secret special superiority; there are poets whose nostalgic picture of special worth in suffering, sensitivity and magical quality is no other than this intermediate “sixth sense”; there are new cult leaders whose special divinity, whose supernatural and visionary claim is no other than

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this mystery of sex . . . Like early witches, the homosexual propagandists have rejected any struggle toward recognition in social equality and, far from seeking to undermine the popular superstition, have accepted the charge of Demonism. Sensing the fear in society that is generated in ignorance of their nature, they have sought not to bring about an understanding, to assert their equality and common aims with mankind, but they have sought to profit by that fear and ignorance, to become witchdoctors in the modern chaos. (Faas, Young Robert Duncan 320)

As Eric Keenaghan has suggested, in this essay “Duncan sought to link gender, sexuality, and nation so that they are no longer treated as discrete categories dividing the population and encouraging inter- and intra-group competition. Instead, his lyric images them as inter-related, similar entities” (90). Arguing fiercely against a “secret special superiority,” Duncan voices disgust with the “nostalgic picture of special worth” of “homosexual propagandists” he aligns with “witchdoctors of the modern chaos.” In so doing, he turns away from the coded stylization of behavior and speech that he witnessed in the literary salons and gay communities of New York and San Francisco. The power of Duncan’ position arises from both a rueful honesty about his own participation in the role-playing and masking of self with which he was deeply familiar and a prescient understanding of the ways in which, for there to be resistance of a homophobic culture-at-large, shifts would have to come from within various sectors of the gay community first. By refusing to engage in a “cult of the homosexual,” Duncan sought in this forward-looking essay to demystify and reinscribe gayness as an integral element of subjectivity; only this way, Duncan suggests, can one seriously assert the gay community’s “equality and common aims with mankind” (320). Moreover, in ways that The Venice Poem play out with remarkable attention to the political consequences of otherwise literary acts, Duncan’s stance in this essay requires a recalibration of our understanding of agency and the social. As Keenaghan describes this process, “Rather than beginning with the individual’s volition to express her difference, agency actually grows out of an eroticized openness to foreignness, an initial receptivity or vulnerability to differences embodied by others” (90). Duncan’s political argument for a re-recognition of the “battlefront toward human freedom” stems from his vaunted call for a more thoroughly “humane” approach to the understanding of the ways in which sexualities manifest themselves in the culture-at-large. Only by coming to terms with the ways in which the struggle for gay rights and gay identity exists as one part of a continuing and larger struggle toward fulfillment

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of our deeper humanity, Duncan suggests, can real equality and freedom be achieved. It must be always remembered that one’s own honesty, one’s battle against the inhumanity of his own group (be it against patriotism, against bigotry, against, in this specific case, the homosexual cult) is a battle that cannot be won in the immediate sense. The forces of inhumanity are overwhelming, but only one’s continued opposition can make any other order possible. (Faas, Young Robert Duncan 322)

The martial metaphor will certainly be familiar to readers of Duncan; what remains deeply compelling here as well is his almost Arendtian view of contemporary political and social life as continuously doing battle with the “forces of inhumanity,” forces that as Duncan suggests include any position that claims superiority for one group over another—even if that group exists as a minority within the culture-at-large. Duncan’s comments on the consequences of the publication of “The Homosexual in Society” from an interview published in 1980 are chastening. As Duncan remarked to Jack Cohn and Thomas O’Donnell, regarding what is still a remarkable turn of American literary history, The article on “The Homosexual in Society” came out and I got a letter from [John Crowe] Ransom, saying that he had not realized that this was a covert advertisement for homosexuality; Kenyon Review was not a journal accepting this sort of thing. [Ransom had accepted Duncan’s “An African Elegy” for publication in the Kenyon Review, then withdrawn acceptance of the poem upon reading Duncan’s essay.] And then I wrote back, “Would you prefer an overt one?” And then I got a letter, and he said he did not know what the law provided, but he believed that homosexuals should be castrated so that they wouldn’t breed more homosexuals . . . So scratch a Southern gentleman and you’ll find something awfully interesting. I was out, just read out, out, out, at a point when I would have been in at the wrong place. (524)

Certainly for the literary establishment, as represented then (and, to some degree, now as well) by the Kenyon Review, the Partisan Review, the Hudson Review, and a host of other like-minded magazines, Duncan’s public declaration represented a break with literary etiquette; more to the point, his position constituted a threat to the decorum of a New Critical mindset that was hostile to any expression of sexuality that deviated from the norms of

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a predominantly white, middle-class readership. Ransom’s attitude is best summed up in a letter to Duncan from December of 1944. According to Ransom, homosexual poets should “sublimate their problem, let the delicacy and subtlety of their sensibility come out in the innocent regions of life and literature” (Faas, Young Robert Duncan 153). As Duncan’s work in The Venice Poem suggests, there was little room for “delicacy and subtlety” when working against a history of cultural subjugation and ignorance veiled in aesthetic judgment. The poem, read out of its own history, descends to us as a disquieting reminder of what it meant to be out at a time when “innocent regions of life and literature” proscribed such subjectivities as a “problem” best left silent. II. “A Canto for Ezra Pound”: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Modernist Revision First published in 1949 in a collection titled Poems 1948–49, The Venice Poem remains an unsettling—and unsettled—text. Looking ahead to Judith Butler’s theorizing of gender binaries, Duncan’s poem emblematizes work of fetishized innocence, as well as complexly interwoven subjectivities. With its “imaginary instructions” that arise partly from life circumstance, partly from a rethinking of the properties of poetic language, Duncan’s poem radiates a “fierce antinomianism” (Keenaghan 88) that both inspects and carefully deconstructs the inventions of selfhood that The Venice Poem rigorously (one could say religiously) engages. As Ekbert Faas has suggested in his biography of the poet, the work charts a key moment in Duncan’s psychosexual and poetic development.2 It signals a deepening of the commitment to poetry as lifework manifest in Heavenly City, Earthly City, and looks ahead to the formal ambition and accomplishments of The Opening of the Field more than ten years later. If the text has become a curio in literary history, more important to the coterie of Duncan scholars than general readers of contemporary American poetry, its value for us still lies in its recalibration of sexuality and subjectivity, its re-inscription of Whitman’s homoerotic poetics in modernist form. More specific to my discussion here, The Venice Poem, scripted in the heyday of the 1940s Berkeley Renaissance, suggests a larger conversation with modernism, one that was revising on the move the way different branches of the modernist tree were to be understood and reevaluated. Significantly, Duncan began work on The Venice Poem immediately following his return to Berkeley after he’d visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1947. Following in the footsteps of Charles Olson, who’d already made his pilgrimage to Pound at St. Elizabeths in 1946, Duncan wrote to Pound early that year.

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As he recalled the gist of this letter to Faas, Here you are a totalitarian, and I’m an anarchist; and here you are with my parents’ anti-Semitism which I threw out the window with miles of other junk; and still you happen to be an absolute master for me in poetry, so poetry must be something completely different from something we assume it actually is. (Faas, Young Robert Duncan 237)

Duncan’s querying of poetic value and its relationship to personal and cultural ethics bear noting, as does the stance of ephebe-to-master the letter assumes. When the visit to Pound finally materialized in the summer, Duncan met a man deeply absorbed in contemporary poetry and poetics, still garrulous and open to meeting younger poets. As Faas has described those visits: Ezra seemed wildly enthusiastic, and on each of their three afternoons together they talked long beyond the official visiting hours. A person who under normal circumstances tends to dominate every conversation, Duncan in this case was glad to listen. There was practically no aspect of Pound he wasn’t familiar with, and hearing Pound talk was like rereading Kulchur for the third or fourth time. Once in awhile Duncan would venture a question or touch upon an issue previously discussed in correspondence. Had Pound read his book Heavenly City, Earthly City and the manuscript of Medieval Scenes he had sent him? Pound had and wondered why a younger poet would get into that, since he had already cleared the ground in earlier years. On the whole, Pound seemed to be far more interested in Duncan’s prose and ideas than his poetry. (240)

The meeting’s value for Duncan, as Faas suggests here, lay in its purchase of poetic capital that would serve as instruct and goad to the writing of The Venice Poem a few months later. The linkages between the gay-identifying The Venice Poem and the modernism of Pound, Eliot, Williams, and so on are worth teasing out here. Interestingly, in the fall of 1946, Spicer and Duncan collaborated on “A Canto for Ezra Pound” while they were living together at 2029 Hearst Street (also collaborating, round-robin-style on this poem were mutual friends Jo and Fred Fredman and Hugh O’Neil). The canto was sent to Pound in December 1946, though it’s not known whether he ever responded. Referencing Leonard Woolf, Al Capone, Sophie Tucker, Cocteau, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name just a few of the pop cult and literary names that appear, “A Canto” is both a send-up of Pound, Eliot, and Williams and others included in

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the modernist cohort, and a coterie-driven rejection of the verities of mainstream culture. The poem opens with a quote attributed to Leonard Wolf, a poet whose work both Duncan and Spicer knew and regarded highly (Killian, Ellingham 14), “Not everybody is the wife of Horace Gregory” (a well-published poet of the 1930s), and continues: “Wonders and wonders and Doubleday Doran. A book of the month club for horses.” “The handsprung apes in the deserted zoo talk of Capone, talk of Capone. A final bestiary.” Thus Spicer, including “all his grapes within the houses.” Every new generation has its new Gods. Why, if New Directions has become a Financial SUCCESS, does it print less POETRY? And Pound printed in all the little mags. piously. With apologies. Every new generation has its new Academies. Every generation faces new Dolts in the EDitorial CHAIRS.

With its satiric reference to Eliot’s “Prufrock” (“The handsprung / apes . . . talk of Capone, talk of Capone”) and skewing of New Directions for printing less poetry than before, the poem lays bare its contempt for a contemporary scene dominated by “new Dolts” who, as the poem’s next line has it, represent “Old bottles and no wine.” The attack on business-as-usual verse-making continues in the following stanza: Reading Poetry Magazine’s piss all over our old Poet TO END ALL POETS. “Why doesn’t someone take Peter Disease for a ride? “Chicago’s cemetery for all verse. TRAITORS TO POETRY! WORSE THAN THE BOOK FOR THE MOUTH DISEASE!

1946. “Looks as bad as any other year.” Even an Atom bomb can’t cheer it up.

“Chicago’s cemetery” is linked to a Book-of-the-Month-Club (“BOOK FOR THE MOUTH DISEASE”) preservation of literary “taste,” one that Spicer, Duncan, and so on ride hard on throughout the piece. If the poem is ribald, it’s also deadly serious about a political and cultural milieu, “bad as any other year,” following the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima

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and Nagasaki, which endorses the efforts of “handsprung apes” over the kind of new poetry, we can assume, the authors of “A Canto” have in mind. Mixing doggerel and racialist discourses, the poem is like an amusement park mirror reflecting back bits and pieces of cultural matter: ES GUD ES ENY UDDER sez Jack Spicer spittin’ ez usual in our old china sugar bowl. A REGLAR MENSTRAL SHEW Or as Sophie Tucker, the Yiddish mama, makin’ ‘em all weep wit’ laughin’ “And it takes a lot of the TAT for the TIT I got.”

The poem’s a critique, all right, crazy quilt of late night bar talk, inside jokes, and loose literary motifs that it is. In perhaps the most striking part of the poem, written in the form of a letter to Pound, Duncan lays out the particulars of an argument that both corroborates Pound’s achievement, while poking some big holes in the monument that sits before “a third generation of poets,” trying to find new ways of writing poems: Dear Pound: As to Usura and the old problem, the sacrifice of all that good poetry to no end, poets gone dead in battling the banks. poets gone dead in battling the enemy, what other enemy than the public demand? It isn’t the principle of the thing It’s the MONEY. With Economics built no man of good stone. 70 odd Cantos shot thru with Econ. 1A And say the answers were all right. All them years fighting clay pigeons, refining a language to shoot at the decoys. Put them in Hell, that’s eloquent enuf. What counts is the eye for a Beautiful thing. Even the shadow is In admiration of the Beautiful thing. A generation out of one man’s sense. 70 odd Cantos fighting clay pigeons, incident with Beauty.

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And when the uproar is done, The young will affirm his intention. A generation tired of the whole works, intent upon beauty in a mean state. “Private names in public places” scrawled on the cans of half a continent. And Pound, avid for public virtue, twenty years of poetry shot thru with Econ. 1A, twenty years in advance of the academies, Thank God, it didn’t work. With public virtue builded no man a house of good stone, nor was poem written to correct polity poem of good stone. Still, beauty shows thru. Food for a third generation of poets. 1946. Ten years after Auden’s invasion. 70 odd Cantos remain curiously right, curiously wrong. The cost of too much concern for the Public Good. R.D.

“The sacrifice of all that good poetry to no end.” The poem asserts a stirring form of public debt, one that Duncan suggests is still being paid, albeit unwittingly. If Williams’s “Beautiful Thing” is, at base, as marred by its own resident complicity in a poetics of shadowy forms, “clay pigeons” that skirt the real, it’s Pound’s project, flawed, incomplete, yet somehow necessary, that Duncan is at pains here to delineate in the crackling lines of this collaborative canto. “Ten years after Auden’s invasion,” Duncan suggests, what’s left, what’s ahead are “70 odd Cantos” that “remain curiously right, curiously wrong.” The asperity of Duncan’s commentary suggests both generational debt being paid and recognition of the “cost of too much concern / for the Public Good.” It’s a rebuke, if you will, of the modus operandi of The Cantos (1983), which are, if nothing else, all about reclaiming a space of public acknowledgment through its economy of collagist methodology and tutelary forms. Highly revealing in terms of its discussion of the Berkeley scene is a letter Spicer wrote to Pound in 1946. It’s not clear if the letter was ever sent, but it has a great deal to say about the coterie of poets working around Duncan and Spicer and their wayward affiliations with modernism. Here’s Spicer,

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mapping out Berkeley for Pound: Poets are conscious here that they are writing the poetry of the forties (whatever that is!), reject Auden with a deadly horror, have a sullen contempt for Eliot which is sometimes tinged with reason, agree with Johnson about “metaphysical poetry,” find the dramatic structure of the Cantos, the elegance of Cocteau, and the “je ne sais quoi” of Williams’ “Patterson” [sic] (which is certainly derivative dramatically from the Cantos) their goals. “Finnegans Wake” stands a little above these as a combination Bible and Mother Bunch. Everyone will call this summary of creed malicious and unfair, but if one were to lay “Patience” in Berkeley, Bunthorne would believe these things. The greatest tragedy is that Yeats is almost completely ignored here. People say they kno [sic] him great and intend to read him someday. There are exceptions to this too, but generally the poetry written around here is too bloody and needs a hardening of poetic arteries. Yeats could have given them that.

The reference to Yeats is intriguing, and certainly makes sense in terms of Spicer’s poetics of dictation. But as a “summary of creed,” what’s telling here is the finessing of modernism almost as a kind of reactionary, old order, with works such as Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake standing still and silent on the terrain, “a combination of Bible and Mother Bunch.” Malicious and unfair Spicer’s judgments may be, but they say a lot about a kind of working out of the problems posed by the orthodoxies of the “new” in American poetry. In ways that are familiar to us now, Spicer’s comments seem to skip generations and could apply as well to sectors of the current American poetry establishment, however one might conceive of such. Later in his letter, Spicer suggests that, politically speaking, Berkeley poets walk a fine line between Stalinist rapprochement and suspect forms of anti-Bolshevism, couched in the rhetoric of the politically vacuous figure of Archibald Macleish: Politically, Berkeley is the avante-garde [sic] of a horse walking backwards. Fortunately, there are no Stalinists or Partisan Reviewers walking around, but the general mass of poets (almost all of whom were violently against Mr. Roosevelt’s War) are beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to become Archibald MacLeishs in the Missouri tie salesman’s coming Crusade Against Bolshevism. By the way, has Wyndy Lewis really become a Stalinist?

The “horse walking backwards” reveals a good deal of Spicer’s contempt for the culture of revisionist political history already coming to life in the years

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immediately following the war. And it pokes a fierce finger in the face of those who would opt for the solution posed by the Archibald MacLeishs of the world. Some years later, Spicer would recall the evenings spent writing “A Canto” in a poem from his book Language. It’s part of a section titled “Love Poems”: 3. “ ‘Arf,’ says Sandy” “To come to the moment of never come back to the moment of hope. Too many buses that are late” Hugh o’Neill in our Canto for Ezra Pound. The ground still squirming. The ground still not fixed as I thought it would be in an adult world. Sandy growls like a wolf. The space between him and his image is greater than the space between me and my image. Throw him a honey-cake. Hell has been proved to be a series of images. Death is a dog and Little Orphan Annie My own Eurydice. Going into hell so many times tears it Which explains poetry. (Collected Poetry 383)

“Private names in public places” would seem to be the operative aesthetic here. A working through that allowed both Spicer and Duncan some space for the necessities of their own work in the 1940s, work both at odds with aspects of Pound’s project and indebted to the monument erected in place of public culture. The debt was, of course, enormous and “A Canto for Ezra Pound” is, in its way, ample and rueful documentation of that debt. Principally speaking, Duncan’s subtle working through of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia as first stated by Pound in his ABC of Reading (1960) exerts an important pressure on Duncan’s early poetic career overall and on the writing of The Venice Poem in particular. There’s no doubt that what Pound gave Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, and others on the scene in this postwar period was a way of recalibrating the broken engine of American poetry, or at least attempting to do so. In accordance with Duncan’s own developing sense of his poetics as bound to the modernist legacies of Pound, Stein, H.D., and Eliot (different parts of each find their way through and into the work of Duncan), the uncompromising (and autocratic) dicta of Pound’s poetics serve as pivot points for Duncan’s discursive practice. In a collagist mode

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adopted to a large degree from The Cantos and The Waste Land (which in the present critical context seems more like a symptom of Pound’s enormously absorptive authority as poet/critic than the integral signature of Eliot’s poetic genius), these rules of conduct form key aspects of the imaginary instructions Duncan enlists as support for his procedures in The Venice Poem. At the same time, the citations from Pound (“the melodic coherence, the tone leading of vowels”) exist in a poetic text whose adherence to such principles is always measured against Duncan’s decided discrepant sense of the discursive formation of literary tradition. Duncan suggests “a realistic image” as a third proposition or “instruction,” but the “real” in his sense of it is far less bound by the historical interrelation of diverse materials (as in Pound), than as to the envisioning of each “image” as it becomes manifest in writing that partakes of precepts of both Pound’s imagism and Eliot’s symbolism. In so far as Duncan positions himself in a line of “great moderns” extending from Pound and H.D. through Zukofsky, Williams, and Olson, he simultaneously risks the “mushy technique” of the Romantics (notably Shelley and Keats) and French Symbolist poets with whom he also shares a deep affinity. Borrowing from the proscriptive agendas of Pound, Duncan nonetheless positions himself in a decidedly dialectical space, wherein he roams freely among a number of competing idioms and authorial figures. As Michael André Bernstein suggests, Duncan is determined to retain the technical repertoire of both Romantic and Symbolist verse forms, and unlike Pound or Olson, it is hard to envisage Duncan issuing lists of works to be avoided for their pernicious influence on young poets. What is so curious about Duncan’s position, then, is that he continues to produce the one indispensable body of work to validate the generative force of a certain tradition while consistently challenging its fundamental axioms. (178)

Indeed, it is this catholicity and openness that mark both the writing of The Venice Poem and later work that would, likewise, celebrate a range of influences and predecessors, with little adherence to the strictures of this or that school or camp or stance. The Venice Poem, like the work that succeeds it in The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968), creates a boundary line, continually crossed over, between the obdurate modernist surfaces of textual and historical allusion and the Symbolist motif of recurring interior meanings: a mode of writing that establishes a means for Duncan to appropriate both the fragmentation and polyphony of The Cantos,

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managing several sites simultaneously: mythic, narrative, allusive, autobiographical, erotic. Interestingly, Pound’s initial response to The Venice Poem was less than positive. “You should have had a plan,” he wrote Duncan at the time, suggesting the limits of Pound’s own appreciation for a kind of poetry that blurred particular historic and literary meanings to achieve a movement and momentum beyond that of an epic structure. Duncan’s desire for Pound’s approbation is genuine and moving, but it is far from total. Even as Duncan himself insists upon a relation between The Venice Poem and The Cantos that privileges Pound’s ideogrammatic and collagist orientation, what seems most apparent now is how far removed from Pound’s project Duncan’s poem actually was. What Duncan’s experience in writing The Venice Poem usefully highlights instead is a fundamental shift in his approach to strategies of modernist collage and a movement toward seriality (or, as Duncan would later term it, the poem-as-grand-collage) as the predominant controlling procedure. If we compare, for instance, a statement by Williams on the collagist orientation of Marianne Moore’s work with almost any section from The Venice Poem, what becomes apparent is the discrepancy between Duncan’s ascription of collage-based procedures to his work and the actual effect produced by the language of his text. Here is Williams: There is almost no overlaying at all. The effect is of every object sufficiently uncovered as to be easily recognizable. This simplicity, with the light coming through from between the perfectly plain masses, is however extremely bewildering to one who has been accustomed to look upon the usual “poem,” the commonplace opaque board covered with vain curlicues. (Selected Essays 129)

Now here are the opening lines of the “Recorso” section of Duncan’s poem: into the long, slow cadence, the anticipating, rapt, attentive, climbing neither upward nor downward, but hovering : dream of sea-surge the tide, the tide of event, And the old gods rising, falling. —Those were only waves roaring— —That dark form, a sea-lion, floating— neither upward nor downward, but sleeping : washd by the tides… (The Venice Poem 94)

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Instead of the discrete objects of Williams’ depiction or the ideogrammatic particulars one might find in The Cantos—“Cut trees at solstice, and arrow shafts of bamboo. / Third month, wild geese go north, / magpie starts building” (Canto LIII)—Duncan’s language is markedly descriptive, working the images into a narrative of symbolic and mythic content. Tone and rhythm (“long, slow cadence,” “hovering : dream of sea-surge”) become the controlling aspects of the poem, as the cadences of the lines establish an emotional context for the rising and falling images. Sometimes, in the mind’s closed eye, everything springs into flame, hot as radium, unstable, death to the touch, the whole sea raging, rising . . . (The Cantos 94)

Duncan’s poem establishes links not so much through the abrupt shifting of image and scene that one encounters in Moore’s “A Grave,” for instance, with its radically disrupted imagery and narrative, but through the careful attention to repeated melodic sequences (as in the musical phrase “recorso”). The poem is accumulative, rather than discretionary; the series rather than the fragment becomes the controlling metaphor for the poem’s procedures. Marking off subtle yet important distinctions between Pound’s methodology and his own, Duncan begins in The Venice Poem to establish the terms by which his “grand collage” would proceed. As Micheal André Bernstein has pointed out, the force of these distinctions lies in those differences in attitude and choice about what goes in to the poem: The very decisions about what emotions or themes are primary, and which secondary, so crucial to the authority of the ideogram, cannot be determined in a grand collage until the process as whole is completed, and even then the equal participation of all the constituent elements may well make any such differentiation irrelevant. (“Talent” 188)

What remains perhaps most striking about both Duncan’s language in The Venice Poem and the formal means used to yoke together the separate sections is the strong affinity for Eliot this poem evinces. While Duncan has openly acknowledged his debt to Eliot, the degree to which Duncan did embrace Eliot’s poetics of the symbolic sublime bears reemphasizing (if nothing else as another way that Duncan subverts expectations regarding influence and remaps his predecessors through the formation of an alternative and openly gay poetic subjectivity). In The Venice Poem Duncan was establishing

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a means of working toward the objectivist romanticism of his later work; in so doing, he remained only partly attentive to Pound’s instructions, while enacting key aspects of Eliot’s poetics of “impersonality” as well. Indeed, it is the presentation of physical, observed realities as a means of establishing a setting for the discourses of subjectivity that remains Eliot’s chief achievement in the poems from his early period—and finds a potent analog in Duncan’s The Venice Poem. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” included in his Collected Poems 1909–1935, suggests one example of the tonal quality and revelation of identity Duncan seems to have been aiming for in his own work: Twelve o’clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. (Eliot, Collected 14)

In its symbolic language with echoes of Jules Laforgue and Baudelaire, and its elegiac tonal rhythms, the poem is familiar to us as early Eliot. More importantly, its mannered, highly metaphoric idiom finds echoes in The Venice Poem: We held our humming heads with both hands, swinging, swinging, to and fro, the light falling away across the water, lavender, rose, ultramarine, rising, falling— the woman climbing up the stairs, the woman climbing up the stairs, the woman climbing up the stairs, up and up, to and fro— open and closed, open and closed— lips parted, teeth half opend, tongue held between, the lips parted, swinging, spinning like a top— Do you remember, remember? (The Venice Poem 95)

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As in Eliot’s “Rhapsody,” Duncan’s poem registers its emotional effect through the use of repetition (“the light falling . . . rising, falling,” “open and closed, open and closed”) and the elegiac cadences of such phrases as “Do you remember, remember?” Indeed, Duncan’s work here succeeds almost entirely through its adroit management of tone and setting, both of which establish primary contexts for our reception of the poem’s symbolic site of loss. Later, in what might seem now as almost a parody of both the high diction of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1971) and the colloquial wordplay of The Waste Land, Duncan fuses his own experience of betrayal and loss with a rhetoric of moralism and private instruction: When you come to this moment the water in the tap drops as if counting the eternity of time. Stop! Look and Listen. Summon up your wisdom. Nothing will answer and the long dark room will not be light when you turn on the light. Your four hundred volumes by the very best authors will go blank as the paper at which you are staring. When you come to this moment the mind goes dead. It will never restore when you cry out in need the faith in which there was no need. When you come to this moment and you are left over, you rise to the occasion and death won’t come. When the love-light perishes and lusting has gone and you try to make up love in the marriage bed, you will long for the violence of the approaching wars. BANG. You will lust for cut of the stone. BANG. (101)

The dactylic meter suggests the dullness of emotional fatigue, even as the language lapses into a prose-like rhythm toward the section’s end, recalling portions of Duncan’s notebook entries from this time. From a contemporary standpoint, one might now wince at the almost prosaic quality of statement, the vacuity of such phrases as “eternity of time,” “the love-light perishes,” and so on. Yet, Duncan wants to risk the “emptiness” and preciousness of such language, both as a way of permitting diverse materials into the poem and of further acknowledging (even in a somewhat hackneyed fashion) his debt to Eliot. More importantly for my discussion here, Duncan’s decision to preserve the Eliot-like register of his poem, in all its awkward and mawkish

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aspects, signals a willingness to allow Eliot into the poem as a formative influence—along with Pound. While this linkage may seem less risky now, it represented a bold move at the time, as Olson in particular forged ahead with a polemically based poetics situated squarely at the doorstep of Pound’s brand of modernism. Eliot, a darling of the New Critics, along with Auden and Stevens, remained something of an anomaly, classical and elitist, where poets like Olson and Creeley were far more interested in ways to move through and beyond Pound. It’s this rift, charted in the developing poetics of Duncan’s work from this period, that gets so much play, and continued to exert an influence on the heterogeneity of Duncan’s later work. If The Venice Poem never quite comes together as a coherent work, the reasons for this would seem to stem in part from the still unresolvable dilemma confronting Duncan as he sought to yoke together two competing notions of the modernist project. While Duncan’s writing from the late 1950s forward suggests that, in the final analysis, his work rests more securely in the Poundian terrain of “direct treatment of the thing” (Essays 3), later supplanted by Olson’s dictum to “USE USE USE the process at all points” (Olson, Human Universe 53), as The Venice Poem demonstrates, this book of “first things” was driven by a number of compelling and competing forces—no one of which can be viewed as decisive. Unlike Pound, whose perceived failure to “make it cohere” was squarely at odds with the totalizing ambitions of the Cantos, for Duncan the point was never coherence so much as a participatory regulation of form in which all the parts become manifest in a design of unbounded potential. Discovering the form in which to say what he had to say meant, as well, finding a form for the subjectivity that was yet en-route in this generative work. Describing his debt to collagist procedure, Duncan would note in his 1985 interview with Burton Hatlen and Michael André Bernstein: The collage world keeps all its references and doesn’t improve anywhere but it knows that if you a get a finer construction, more details—then you’ve got something. Because the imagination is leaping to find something that holds all that together. Correcting is to surrender to an earlier picture in which things hold together, by eliminating new things that were impossible. (88–9)

This is, in its way, a cogent statement on the workings of subjective presence in the poetry. Not correcting, not revising, amplifies the ethics of a poetry devoted to an elegant, but manifestly real, depiction of the self’s engagement in a world that is presented, without correction or revision. In the context of a queer poetics of subjectivity, one could say that Duncan adjoins the

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aesthetic project of modernism with a layered understanding of collage as a beneficent procedure of identity formation. If Duncan learned through the writing of The Venice Poem how to synthesize a wealth of psychosexual and literary materials in a work that fittingly pays tribute to Pound’s collagist methodology (one that is itself indebted to turn-of-the century experiments in the visual arts), he also pays homage here to his other master, Eliot. Using a symbolist framework for his own meditations on the split screen of form and content, world and self, Duncan participates in an exchange of poetic influences that goes in a number of directions at once. Reading Shakespeare, Eliot, and Pound back into his own poem, Duncan elides the question of his own authorial position, suggesting instead that the poem moves through the discretionary particularities of the writer’s (un)conscious affiliations and attachments. In so doing, writer and text are perceptibly transformed by what Duncan describes elsewhere as “a romance of the actual” (Selected Prose 136). III. Venetian and Shakespearian Motifs in The Venice Poem In a letter addressed to his friends at the time, Duncan would describe the process of writing The Venice Poem as one that remained arduous always as there seems to be in each passage now to me shadows of the unrealized, intimations of the unknown. I mean here just all that remains to be comprehended in this poetic universe. For the joy of each discovery or consummation—the apprehension just here of what has not been discovered nor consumed. (Duncan Papers/U Cal).

Duncan’s sense of the work at hand as that of pursuing the “unknown” and shadowy terms of his poem’s multiple meanings forms a central aspect of his developing awareness of his own vocational engagement and ambition. As Duncan would describe the matter years later, it was the first time he recognized “the full structural imperative of a form seeking to come into existence in the process of the poem that, at the same time, I was in my own work working in cooperation with, coming to acknowledge in the works of the poem” (Caesar’s Gate xii). The chapbook length poem (thirty-five pages in the City Lights edition) follows the form of a sequence and is broken into six sections, each of which carries a title suggestive of a thematic or metaphoric topos: “A Description of Venice,” “Testimony,” “Imaginary Instructions,” “Recorso,” “The Venus of Lespuges,” and “Coda.”3 Without a strict narrative structure per se, the poem proceeds thematically and associatively as it explores the dramatic consequences—psychological, sexual, aesthetic—of a

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lover’s betrayal. Using Shakespeare’s Othello and its plot of marital infidelity as an initial organizing rubric, Duncan works with each of the sections as “movements” in a symphony—loosely following the form of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. In so doing, he musters together a good deal of autobiographical, literary, artistic, and cultural information to form an elaborate collage of highly charged material. While no one individualized presence dominates the poem (it is a notable feature of the work that it shifts registers and “voices” throughout), the “I” who emerges as The Venice Poem’s primary speaker functions as a kind of fictive guide through whom we view the imaginary city of Venice that is the poem’s topographical focal point. “The poet’s cry of loss,” Michael Davidson writes, is set against the backdrop of two cities, one ancient, the other contemporary. Renaissance Venice, which Duncan knew only through art history slides, represents an unearthly city of gilded domes and ageless monuments. Contemporary Berkeley represents the other side of Venice, the historical city whose campanile bells mock the poet’s desire for transcendence. (Renaissance 55)

While primary information about Venetian architecture and artwork came to Duncan via the art courses he attended at UCLA Berkeley in 1948, other pertinent aspects of the city’s history—for instance, its reputation in the seventeenth century for open sexuality and promiscuity—would no doubt have been available to him through his readings of Shakespeare, Jonson and other playwrights of the period.4 Though the poem’s imaginative impact is undeniable, it remains a startling fact that Duncan had never in fact visited Venice. This accounts, at least in part, for some of the more “literary” language of its opening description of the city in which the poem traverses a realm both culturally recognizable and ineffable in the poet’s consciousness: The lions of Venice crouch suppliant to the ringing in the air. The bell tower of San Marco shakes the gold of sound upon the slumbering city. Gathering, the bronze boy burns the blue of sky with jewel blue eyes. The lions crouch suppliant to the ringing, burning blue. (The Venice Poem 81)

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With its echoes of Hart Crane and Eliot (especially “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” and The Waste Land), the language conveys a scene of eroticized—and decidedly elegiac—tranquility. The poem’s locale creates a dreamy backdrop for the actions of a work in which the primary thematic reference points will be betrayal and loss. The talismanic presence of the bronze boy, captured in the back-looking gaze of the poem’s speaker, suggests a parallel in Duncan’s excursion into the realm of homoerotic persuasiveness, as he relocates himself in a scene caught in the reflected radiance of the boy’s eye, “as if he saw all love was frozen there in knowing, / forming a central sapphire, / cruel and absolute” (ibid.). The scene as well accords with Duncan’s sense of the poem as a progression from “signs,” moments of apprehension read in the events of persons—the apprehension of something cruel and unmasking in the lustful and shrewd fixd glance of a young boy in whose blue eyes seemed a written story of calculating but meaningless accident, and in whose lithe autoerotic body seemd the universe of rich sensuality. (Duncan Papers/SUNY )

Duncan’s remark suggests both a prescient commentary on the homoerotics of the gaze and a critically acute assertion of his role as reader of his own poem. Moreover, Duncan’s “apprehension of something cruel and unmasking” registers the poem’s tension between homoerotic desire and self-abnegating pathos. As a site of impinged homoerotic longing, Duncan’s Venice provides both a literary fiction of a “Carnal City” (ibid.), an artifact of Duncan’s ritualizing imagination, and a foundational scene of the poem’s writing. Duncan’s work here becomes one of forging out of the details of personal crisis a poem resonant with the carefully formed particulars of a universalist awareness. As he writes in his 1964 essay “Towards an Open Universe,” “Our consciousness, and the poem as a supreme effort of consciousness, comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity” (Selected Prose 3). Or, as Duncan phrased it in another context, “I work with what is the matter with this life in an alchemical operation seeking not the overthrow of the matter—though increasingly the theme of letting it all go comes into the works—but the transvaluation of that matter” (Fictive 137). Duncan’s notion of his materials—autobiographical, literary, mythic, cross-cultural—as being worked in an “alchemical” process in which the poem emerges suggests an alternative reading of Eliot’s sense of the poem as a distinctly “impersonal” act. As he begins to organize these materials in The Venice Poem, Duncan’s “interweaving” of the expressively individualistic and the multitextual suggests an active mediation, in which the poem

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functions as a vector of several narratives at once. Following the model of Pound’s Cantos, no one account or “fragment” is given supremacy over any other; rather, the poem provides us with brief portions of emotional and cultural material—whose full impact can only be assessed from the composite meaning of the poem’s elements. Inasmuch as The Venice Poem functions as the preliminary staging ground on which Duncan’s newly achieved apprehension of his own ambitions are played out, Shakespeare’s Othello serves as a drama well suited to the poet’s methodical apprenticeship. Duncan’s use of Othello in The Venice Poem is concertedly an act of literary derivation overdetermined from the outset by the range of references Shakespeare’s play necessarily invokes. As is popularly known, Othello is most clearly a play about betrayal, jealousy, and revenge, and, as Duncan’s poem asserts, the psychosexual struggle at the play’s center arises from a conceptual investigation of the ways in which power is deployed, made manifest, and engaged culturally and intersubjectively. Insofar as much of the play is devoted to a dilation of Othello’s suspicions and jealousies as he comes to doubt the fidelity of his wife, Desdemona, the real drama occurs around the figure of Iago as he seeks to advance his rank, while bringing to an end Othello’s own position as a much-decorated general in service to the Venetian state. Iago’s single-mindedness in his quest to destroy Othello has been the subject of Shakespeare scholarship for decades, but what is interesting from the point of view of Duncan’s poem is the way in which Iago exists as a paradigm of the masked figure who never reveals his “true” identity. As Iago confesses to Roderigo early on in the play: For when my outward action does demonstrate The native act, and figure of my heart, In complement extern, ‘tis not long after, But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve, For doves to peck at: I am not what I am. (I.i.61–65)

For Duncan, absorbed in the fashioning of a masked persona, Iago provides an ample site for his own explorations of masculine subjectivity and the poet’s role in constructing a self both more and less real than that of his own person. “There is no mask I wear / that is not emotion, / that is not deeply rooted,” Duncan writes (106). Playing on the terminology of mask as a covering, frontis, disguise, and protective shield, Duncan suggests the complex relation between the artificed subjectivity of the male poet and the lived experiences that underwrite that subject. More to the point, the play’s heterosexual surface allows Duncan to explore gay sexuality under cover,

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so to speak. As Gunn remarks on the strategy of “translation” employed by many gay writers of the time to make their “irregularity” less visible, Duncan reverses the gender of the drama, both to explore a non-heteronormative space of erotic longing and to put into question his own decidedly gay orientation as part of an unfolding drama within the larger drama of Shakespeare’s play (Gunn 144). If the feelings are disguised, they are hidden just barely out of view. In this sense, Iago, in Shakespeare’s rendering of him, may indeed exist as a figure of ultimate cunning and duplicity; but it is these very qualities that serves as instigatory marks for Duncan’s investigation of his own highly “worked” manipulation of events and character within The Venice Poem.5 Describing the play of words in the poem like “the play of actors on a stage” (Selected Prose 7), Duncan provides an apt metaphor for his own procedures in the poem’s opening sections, in which Shakespeare (renamed “Saint William Shakespeare,” in keeping with the work’s predominant high rhetorical mode) appears alongside Othello and Iago as a figure on the stage of the poem. And when Saint William Shakespeare plagued by the flies of jealousy and rage entered the Carnal City and stood defiant with love in full sight of the Doge, he lit the holy tapers and worshipd under the five adulterous false domes of burnishd copper. (The Venice Poem 81)

In the stylized language of its address, the text both celebrates the “tutelary” figure of Shakespeare, who remained for Duncan an authorial presence matched only by that of Dante, and foregrounds the “artificial” nature of the poem’s literary production. Indeed, it is at the level of “puppetry” that The Venice Poem becomes most revealing, as Duncan claims a space in the work for both his own role as author and the “fictions” of his imagination. Blurring the line between each, as he blurs distinctions between his writing of the poem and the experiential realities to which it alludes, Duncan’s poem suggests a narrative in which Shakespeare is himself “betrayed” by his own fictive creation: The Doge, Iago, knowing more than Shakespeare,

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saw with cynic wonder at such poetic consternation the lewd shadows haunting the holy candles; saw with satisfaction the simple-minded Shakespeare light with love the beautiful fat candles. (The Venice Poem 81–2)

Aligning Shakespeare with the tragic figure of Othello, Duncan suggests a meeting of textual realities in which the playwright and his fictions are distributed in a space both wholly actual and wholly made-up. In this way, the force of Iago as a character drawn from Shakespeare’s play extends far beyond the limits of his creator’s mind. The reference to Shakespeare’s “simpleminded” devotion as compared to the “cynic wonder” of Iago suggests a curious separation between author and text and author and character, one that mirrors Duncan’s own procedural marking out of personae through whom his poem’s voicing occurs. It as well provides another context in which to read the poem: as a recasting of the plot of adultery, as it appears in Shakespeare’s text, into a dynamic in which Iago betrays not only Othello, but his creator as well—a situation that, Duncan seems to suggest, is beyond Shakespeare’s ability to control. While this shifting of “real” and “fictive” may strike one as fanciful, it is important to stress the way in which, for Duncan, Shakespeare’s text resonates as a book of continuous making. Recast on the stage of The Venice Poem, the characters from Othello form a trans-historical space in which psychologically charged language and imagination merge to forge the new work, thereby exceeding the boundaries of either text. Duncan discusses the complicated scenario of self-generating, authorial power, and productivity in a revealing passage from Caesar’s Gate (1972): I had wanted, I think, a fatefulness in my poetry, an inevitability to its course, an autocracy, as if, indeed, in the person of the poet in writing, I were in the person of “I” who created my life and world, in the enormity of a governing intent, as content of a poetry or creation. God, then, appears in the poem, as the Gnostic heresies portray him, as the creator or poet who is guilty of his creation, behind whose reality there is an other reality. This God is a Creator in search of an Identity that is in the process of Its creation; He projects the theater of Time and Space in which to become manifest. He is betrayed by his poetry. (xvii)

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What remains most astonishing is the link Duncan makes here between the “I” who informs the work of the poem and the greater I of God the Creator. Does Duncan really mean to suggest that he occupies a god-like position in the artistic process? A qualified response would have to be: yes and no. At one level he seems to be arguing for a vision of the creative process as entirely self-sufficient. The poet begins in the arena of his devotions and inner life and proceeds outward from that toward a position in which the I can be claimed as a force behind the work. At another level, Duncan’s language suggests the difficulty involved in translating this process into real terms; in a terminology that borrows from the Romantic sense of originary self, he argues for a view of poeisis as one in which God, poet, and subjectivity exist on a continuum of procedural form—form, one might add, that requires the revelatory procedures of the God/maker to achieve meaning. Duncan’s peculiar notion of God’s being “betrayed by his poetry” places the writing of The Venice Poem in the context of an evolving “mystery play,” in which God must perpetually search for the identity of his creation. For the poet seeking spiritual affirmation in the Word, the claims are stark and all-encompassing. Folding himself into the work in which he is both active participant and originating force, Duncan musters enormous psychic and poetic energies on behalf of a project that, by his own reckoning, is doomed to failure. As God is betrayed by the poetry of his Creation, so the poet is likewise betrayed by those forces and identities that exceed the bounds of his own making. “Since God is not a Logos defining all the essential properties of being, but a force seeking to realize himself in evolution,” Charles Altieri pointedly suggests, “Duncan’s allegory keeps returning to its own failures, to the lacunae in the text, for it is only by encountering what is lost or not present that one can help gather together that divine Being which escapes man” (Temple 152). In this twofold process, Duncan suggests that the poet is implicated in the inevitability of guilt, as he recognizes his failure to apprehend that version of creative form “behind whose reality there is another reality.” Inasmuch as the themes of betrayal and guilt are intimately interwoven throughout Duncan’s (and Shakespeare’s) text, it is important to see how Duncan viewed these as paradigmatic forces of creativity and poetic validation. Hearing in the work a song that Othello does not sing in Shakespeare’s text, Duncan enlists the powerful thematic narratives of adultery and betrayal (it is important to point out that in the play, as in the poem, overwhelming jealousy is the response to an adultery that is in fact never witnessed). In so doing, he reworks these themes in a dramatic setting that underscores the poem’s status as a derivative text. The plaintiveness of

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the I-based lyric is undercut by its position in Duncan’s poem as that of a “voiced” Other: Why is the house so still? Where have you gone? My knowing now will never be still. My loving now will never be still. I am like an empty shell tortured by voices. Alone I know not where I am. I cry out. My voices answer. O my soul’s joy! Love burns in changes of the Moon. She comes so near to earth and makes men mad. Alone I know not where I am. The world is false as water. It echoes back the heart’s desire. Love burns in changes of the Moon. (The Venice Poem 83–4)

Duncan ventriloquizes the voice of Othello to enlist the powerful narrative of Shakespeare’s drama in a tripartite movement among the figures of the Moor; the I that appears in the language of the lyric; and Duncan as invested author, whose personal narrative of loss and betrayal is implicated in the emotional content of Othello’s speech. It is a principal maneuver in The Venice Poem, one in which Duncan effectively creates a palimpsest of materials (psychosexual, cultural-historical, and interpersonal), whose convergence mimics the collaged fragmentation of Pound and Eliot. Rather than offering a singular, linear, and temporally segmented account, Duncan’s text traverses a layered, imaginal environment in which the individual voices in the poem are situated between each other and the mythical, polyphonous realm in which they appear. Interestingly, Othello’s voice responds to a figure who never speaks in the poem: that of Desdemona. The subject of Othello’s (and Duncan’s) discourse, she remains the “true witness” and “advocate” of Othello’s suffering, “confident of merit, and conscious of innocence.”6 A symbol of “feminine” purity and ultimately the more injured party in this drama (her death through suffocation at the play’s end suggests the horrifying antithesis of “song” performed

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by Othello in Duncan’s text), Desdemona exists as that unexpressed site of incontrovertible (and feminine) honesty. While Duncan never gives her voice in the poem, Desdemona provides a powerful counterpoint to the thoroughly homosocial matrix that remains The Venice Poem’s primary focus—an alternative version, if you will, of “Our Lady of Love,” in whose service Duncan suggests, “There is no pain / that I would not bear for her sake” (105). More importantly, even though Duncan never fully elaborates on Desdemona as a tragic figure, her position in the poem suggests Duncan’s profound sympathy for a character whose fidelity and honesty are no match for Othello’s enlarged rage and jealousy or Iago’s cunning manipulations. And in this sense too, Duncan inhabits the “feminine” space of Shakespeare’s tragic character, blurring the boundaries of gender and language that, as Duncan’s poem suggests, become alternative fictions of mind. In a certain sense, then, Duncan plays all the roles of his poem simultaneously; his casting of Desdemona as the silent, feminine portion of his own identity seems fitting in a text that subverts traditional markers of sexuality to reinscribe a queer poetics. The poem’s attractiveness, its sublime authority, may be said to rest on this eliding of structural gender in favor of a more diffuse and porous conception of the self as traveling along a stream of gender identifications—marked in language at once mythological, erudite, and poly-vocal. IV. Blood Rites and the Trauma of Sexuality As I’ve already suggested, the signal achievement of The Venice Poem rests in its simultaneous management of diverse cultural, mythic, anthropological, and psychosexual issues. In any one of these areas, Duncan would have drawn justifiable distinction for a work of singular ambition and vision. It is in fact the vulnerability of the poem’s language that remains most striking today, the way Duncan refuses to valorize the speech of masculinist address, appropriating instead a discourse of vulnerable and wounded (masculine) shamefulness, explicating a position of discursive sexuality not easily ascribed to any one subjectivity. If the poem can be said to have any canonicity, it may be for its specular repositioning of eros as a site of “imaginary instructions,” mutable, not singular or binaried. Viewed through the lens of “liberation and contestation” (Keenaghan 89), The Venice Poem celebrates discordancy, as it passes before us “lantern-slide visions” of a Venice constructed out of whole cloth, invented and beyond repair in the poet’s translation of this “unreal city.” It is in The Venice Poem that Duncan confronts for the first time in poetic language the terms of a struggle outlined in his essay “The Homosexual in Society.” While this essay represents Duncan’s vocal coming out in a prose

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format, in The Venice Poem he articulates as he had never before in his poetry the actual physical language of his own sexual identification. “A blood initiation” is how Duncan later described the events surrounding the writing of the poem (Gay Sunshine 84). The comment is notable, in that it refers to another statement Duncan makes, in which he links his crosscountry journey to Pound and the pain suffered en-route from an infected wisdom tooth to the sexual energies and torment that heavily mark this time in his life: “The blood that comes into the rites of the poems of The Venice Poem period is the blood that could gush up from a torn vein left after the operation on those sunken teeth and did when in sexual excitement my blood pressure increased, filling my mouth and throat” (Caesar’s Gate xiii). The sense of blood loss as it is connected with the loss of teeth suggests a rite of passage, a fundamental transition in his psychic person. Interestingly, as Abraham and Torok suggest in their essay “The Illness of Mourning”: “Teething marks the first great transition, hence its symbolic value in the evocation of transitions in general. Whether it is the oedipal passage, adolescent growth, the attainment of adulthood or progress toward menopause, ‘teeth’ always lend themselves to symbolizing the vicissitudes of libidinal reorganization” (123). Significantly, Duncan’s passage toward Pound (who exists here as a kind of pre-oedipal father) and the processes leading up to the writing of The Venice Poem coincide as parallel events of psychosexual/poetic transformation. Certainly, at one key level, it is the “trauma of sexuality” (Boone 76) that gives rise to the poem, a trauma that in part grew out of the circumstances surrounding Duncan’s break-up with his partner of the time, Jerry Ackerman. As Faas recounts it, as the couple drifted apart, Duncan “would insist on a basic freedom in their relationship allowing for sexual contacts other than those between himself and Jerry. When confronted with the actual facts, however, such generosity at least concerning his lover’s sexual freedom quickly gave way to raging jealousy” (Young Robert Duncan 255). Duncan’s outrage and hurt are evident in his journal entry from March 13, 1948, as he describes his jealousy and anguish over Jerry’s unfaithfulness: Now I must sit in these hours, listening to the clock tick. Jerry’s being away with someone else fucking or wanting to fuck cast panic upon me. There is no agony like these moments or hours, these unbearable stretches of time. O God how can I bear it? If only Robin [Blaser] had come up with me to sit and talk, to divert my mind. If he does not return I will walk alone in the hills for awhile—to be alone here is to be deserted—every living object of the room causing pain, mocking me. (Ibid.)

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“Fucking or wanting to fuck”—these are propositional statements that both entice and repel, as the figure of the poet manqué gets situated here in the discourse of intimate loss. If the injury apparent in this language is notable for what it suggests about Duncan’s state of mind at the time, it’s also the case that this notebook entry served a kind of prewriting that brought Duncan into the central arena of his poem’s more elaborate (and poeticized) configuration: My jealousy is like a jewel, a sapphire or sapphire needle “good for 1000 performances,” cruel and absolute, from which comes my music, at once apparent and mysterious this beauty, as the apparent, yet explainable phonograph and recording disc renders the impressed concerto of voices for the listening ear. For the hearer, there is no apparatus, no ingenuity, but the ingenuous melody distracts, not happy, but splendid. (87)

The poem here delivers an image of startling metaphoric power, a kind of enlisting of jealousy itself as the driving force behind the “melody” that emanates from the poem’s epicenter. With its combined image of the sapphire drawn from childhood memory and the ad copy for the phonograph stylus (with its double meaning of writing instrument and phonograph needle), the passage puns on its own sources in the poet’s biography. While Duncan’s journal entry preserves elements of the traditional high school or college diary, with the notable exception of the homosexual cast of the romance, his language at this point in the poem is notable for its dispersion of those same materials into lyric correspondences that maintain both the “apparent” and the “mysterious” as poles of poetic meaning. And as the next stanza suggests, “Great Jealousy is no mere needle. / Terrible and lovely the Greeks addressed her” (87). In ways that this passage makes manifest, the psychosexual content of the poem tends almost immediately to be transformed into the mythic, as the diurnal gives way to the symbolic and imagined. As The Venice Poem tellingly illustrates, Duncan’s text simultaneously occupies a space of religious and mythic instruction, even as it enlists a language of direct and frank sexuality that is at variance with its otherwise “unreal,” denaturalized vocabulary.

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Recalling a bust of Bernini that he had seen at the Andrew Mellon Museum, the poem’s speaker asks: Why am I toucht so deeply? There is a root, faithless and painful, from which we spring. Why does the rose never cease unfolding but grows and unfurls the swirl, the twist, the savage despair of draperies so that its beauty surpasses knowing. (89)

The sense of “rootedness” (a play on the exposed “root” cited in the earlier Caesar’s Gate passage) exposes the self to its own faithlessness and to a painful acceptance of the role one plays in the unfolding drama of the poem. It is a sense that quickly gives way to a shocking and highly exposed language of self-laceration and shame: Accident will finally strip the king and show him naked in a moment’s mirror. —This is not the exalted face Bernini saw— the forlorn cocksucker is not wonderful. (89)

Providing the psychosexual and critical center of the poem, this passage foregrounds with dramatic force the sense of a “despised” self that stands at the other extreme of “the cross-eyed king of one thousand lines” (88). The language suggests the degree to which claiming a space of recognition and acceptance remains for the speaker of this poem a difficulty situated in cultural, personal, and homoerotic materials that defy separation: Buggery stirs enmity, unguarded hatred. Cocksucking breeds self-humiliation, pride, helplessness; begets Lotophagoi, dreamers. Yet here seeks the heart solace. Nature barely provides for it.

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Men fuck men by audacity. Yet here the heart bounds as if only here, here it might rest. (90)

Punning on lotophagi, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “lotuseaters; a people in Greek legend who lived on the fruit of the lotus, which was said to cause a dreamy forgetfulness in those who ate it,” Duncan links “faggotry” with forgetfulness and erotic indolence. Claiming that “men fuck men by audacity,” Duncan defines a queer space of radicalized marginality, one that is in this sequence of lines made to occupy a central stance of ideological refusal and vulnerability. The diction of this passage is a radical departure from what has preceded it and, in effect, provides the poem its crucial midpoint. The unguardedness of Duncan’s language, its resolute defiance of social and legal barriers to such openness (at the time Duncan was writing, homosexual activity was still a crime punishable in parts of the United States by lifetime imprisonment and anti-sodomy laws were still on the books in most states), effectively marks The Venice Poem as a decidedly political and publicly queer document. Interestingly and important to note here, two versions of this poem were originally published, one with the references to “cocksucker,” the other with the lines containing this word struck through by solid lines. As Duncan wrote to Henry Wenning in a letter dated November 7, 1972, “I had wanted 100 of the 500 copies censored (for sale to sensitive old ladies at poetry readings), and the printers (who were sensitive old lady anarchists) reversed the proportions so that 100 uncensored copies and 400 censored copies were printed” (Bertholf 25). Duncan’s partial acceding to cultural norms bears noting, as does his simultaneous emphasis on preserving the openly gay references that anchor the work in a discourse he had entered into with the publication of “The Homosexual in Society.” In ways that still startle more than sixty years later, the passage given earlier connects “cocksucking” with a range of emotional states from selfhumiliation to dreamy. The “audacity” of the act is matched by a corollary awareness of the ways in which the speaker would locate for himself, beyond the purely sexual moment, respite and recognition in the arms of another. “Yet here seeks the heart solace,” Duncan writes. Where we are— where here is—remains an ambiguity, as the poem’s language engages sexuality in images of both profane and sacrosanct self-actualization. Here is the poem as “testimony,” as (p)act in which the lovers’ embrace forms both a despised and pure symbol of original feeling. As in Duncan’s later “This Place Rumord To Have Been Sodom” (1960), the poem moves paratactically

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toward a position of cultural and personal acceptance and forgiveness (in both the Christian and secular senses). Profoundly an act of envisioning, reception, attentiveness, the poem charts a course of negotiable realities in which the conception of form and content are grounded in the poet’s recognition of his role in a sensuous realm of reciprocal feeling: One of the most important things for me in poems is realizing. If this poem will not be a root back to the place where the hand knows the cock, the mouth knows the cock. No matter what is in it (the poem), that it go there and find what it is. (Gay Sunshine 87)

Allowing no barrier between what he sees and what he says in the poem forms a crucial element in Duncan’s aesthetic orientation, and provides as well the queer ethics of a poem that refuses to shy away from the centrality of its most representative sexual act. As with the figures of Greek and early Roman mythology that appear, the naming of “cocksucking” is not meant to be decorative or figuratively descriptive, but to form a picture in the mind wherein thought and sensation are given language. In this way, as with Jack Spicer’s “real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper” (33), Duncan intends us to read the cocks and mouths in The Venice Poem as real cocks in real mouths. Sexuality is not a figure of speech; rather, it becomes one part of the unfolding narrative of social reality the poem depicts. Like the woman coming into the room described by Duncan in his interview with Faas, the physical manifestations of sexuality (whether cocksucking or fucking or kissing) do not refer; they are. “We must understand what is happening,” Duncan writes in the poem’s next section. As The Venice Poem makes explicit, naming homosexual acts within the poem forms a constitutive part of its developing poetic. For in representing a realistic and decidedly painful image of those activities that, culturally speaking, lack a name (in the sense that they remain “unspoken”), Duncan suggests the ways in which his poem can lead to new forms of knowledge in the world—and a repudiation of self-punishment and denial of “true” forms of experience. Amidst the Apollonian atmosphere that permeates the poem, Duncan argues for a syncretic comprehension of the ways that the cultural markers of sexuality and difference can be usefully mined as sites of ontological transformation and poetic making/ meaning. Much of the force of Duncan’s critique and exposed position in The Venice Poem stems from this acknowledgment of the twin poles formed by the erotic and poetic acts: a dispensation of the real in which the poet forges from what is culturally abased or silenced a formative new knowledge. It represents as

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well a marked repudiation of attitude (of the poem as “stance” or conceit) and a perceptive seeking of Form: Our daily affections are a gentle practiced removal from a reality that threatens to overcome us. Our sexual pleasure is a protective appetite that distracts us or blinds the psyche to the primal Eros, as all the preoccupations of our poetic craft preserve a skin of consciousness in which we are not overtaken in fear of the Form that works there. (Truth and Life of Myth 28)

V. “To imagine in an other light”: The Poetics of Revisionary Subjectivity In his 1972 “Preface” to Caesar’s Gate, Duncan describes the feeling of returning to the work included in this volume, the earliest of which dates from the mid-1950s. As he suggests, the impulse to erase parts of the record that remain embarrassing or otherwise difficult to assimilate needs to be balanced by the accompanying recognition that what is at stake in any retrospective evaluation are versions of self (and subjective experience) that cannot be “corrected” or “revised”: [Caesar’s Gate] is not the book of a conclusion or a coming to satisfaction. It proves not to be, as I thought it was, the book of a passage, a transition from one state to another, for it proposes a dissatisfaction that belongs to my present work as I know it. In this art—it is an art transforming every stage of itself in every stage throughout the time of its creation—every “error” reveals the truth of what we took to be true, every “failure of tone” reveals the tone we missed in what we took to be in tune, every “false face” shows true the intent its wearer makes in the face . . . .Ultimately, the good reason of our refusal to censor or to “correct” is that we seek not to get rid of what embarrasses us or what does not seem true to our lights but to go beyond embarrassment—beyond shame or disgust or outrage—to imagine in an other light, to see in a larger sight what we had rather was dismissed from view. (xxxvi)

Duncan’s concern with a version of selfhood and personality positioned in work that might now cause embarrassment or shame reveals a key aspect of his poetics, namely his refusal to shy away from the “mistaken” or the “masked.” To Duncan’s way of thinking (and this has significant consequences for how we read The Venice Poem more than sixty years after its initial publication), there is really no such thing as an error or failure in the work of art. There are, to be sure, errors of judgment and failures of

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awareness, but these too, Duncan suggests, need to be preserved in the text as markers of an evolving engagement in form and self-definition. Proposed here as well is a notion of vulnerability, openness to events and persons that lie outside one’s social space. “To go beyond embarrassment,” as Duncan here suggests, is to exert pressure in a particularly important way on those elements of one’s self that would otherwise close down in shamefulness or self-denial. In formal terms, Duncan needed to discover how to work in an art that wouldn’t preclude person, place, or thing, no matter how ugly or embarrassing or shameful. As defined by Keenaghan, the form of vulnerability expressed earlier links with a politics, as well as an ethics: “Vulnerability can produce a feeling for political collectivity. It is the root cause of courage, wherein all politics originates” (24). In a very real sense, Duncan’s work in The Venice Poem stages a public address in vulnerable, suggestively political terms. What it risks is a coherent subjectivity; what it would gain us is a forum for the advancing of a critical understanding of the conjoint elements of public statement and interiority. If the refusal to revise suggests an ethics in Duncan’s work, its sources can be traced back to the collagist impulse that is centrally informing for The Venice Poem. As Peter Quartermain, in “Duncan’s Texts,” has identified as the hard stance Duncan took toward revision of his own texts, Duncan’s habit of sometimes multiple drafts and versions of the same poem, even after their publication in book form, recurs as a motif throughout his writing career. The poem in a certain sense becomes a porous membrane of life circumstance, as the time of the poem’s initial writing, physical sensations, other writing that came into the process are folded into a process that seeks a dispersion of boundaries within the limits of form: The poem must be true to the circumstances of its composition—the room where it is written, the disturbances of the poet, the thoughts that come unbidden, the feelings of discomfort or of joy that arise as the poem unfolds itself, the possibilities the poem holds forth to the imagination and voice of the poet as he writes, the deep and sometimes desperate trouble at the heart of all poems. (“Duncan’s Texts” 114)

In its engendering of fortuitous circumstances, the poem issues from a direct translation of those “disturbances” that “come unbidden” as the poetic text “unfolds” in the multiple possibilities of statement and representation. Where authorial agency (or the “lyric interference of ego,” to cite Olson) is elided through a process that seems both mystical, a form of translation and

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evaporation of subjectivity, Duncan returns us again and again to “the deep and sometimes desperate trouble at the heart of all poems.” As I’ve suggested at various points throughout, what makes The Venice Poem credible as a reading experience now is the way in which Duncan adhered to this principle of firstness, of that primacy accorded the full, contingent experience of writing as life process. Whatever else one might say about the relative success or failure of this work (successes or failures that need to be addressed along the same formal criteria Duncan sets for himself in this work), it signals a distinct departure for Duncan into the realm of conscious management of form and content (form as content, content as form) and a simultaneous refusal to erase or censor those seemingly extraneous—and often painful—pieces of life experience that inform the poem’s making: How deep the violation goes. Heal. There are so many faces, forms. Heal. So many arbitrary divisions. I do not want to drift. stops. CHANGES. There must be a moment when that faith returns. The artist searches out the deepest roots. (The Venice Poem 102)

The poem’s solution—and Duncan’s—was to allow the disparate and random, the “erroneous” and “false,” to appear as congruent pieces of the poem’s writing. Neither projecting the certitudes of a unified subject nor denying the rhapsodic and elegiac impulses that shape this project as well, Duncan elicits our attention precisely because of its indulgences and vulnerabilities. Refusing correction, attending to the spectacle of the work as it unfolds, Duncan creates an ethical bridge between the “poem as a mirror” and the subject seeking solace in the worldly embrace of others.

CHAPTER THREE

In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and the Poetics of (Mis)Translation

the light and shadow become the substance of men and women the ceremony or operation of this storm, southwest wind burning the new leaves of the mountain ash they have said the word means breath but that is the meaning borrowed from spiritus an inhalation and exhalation of the world a steam a vapour or it means the immortal part given it floats in the language as the opposite the inseparable freedom of a primal ambiguity —Robin Blaser, “Image-Nation 10 (marriage clothes” It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem—and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummysheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it. —Jack Spicer, After Lorca

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I Translation is, as Spicer recognized, risky business. Involving issues of poetic tradition, language (“words around the immediate”), and the insistent subjectivity of the poet him/herself engaged in the act of translating, translation presents a particularly fraught region in contemporary poetic discourse. At stake are notions of the real, the “truthfulness” of the encounter between poet and language, language and the world. “A really perfect poem,” Spicer has famously said, “has an infinitely small vocabulary” (Collected Books 25). Following from this, one could suggest that a really perfect translation proposes the invisibility of all language, the short-lived and implicitly time-bound aspect of words that “shrivel and decay like flesh around the body.” What’s left is something recognizable as poetic meaning: not translation as “copy”; translation as that which has vanished and crossed over into another state. In particular ways that I want to trace out in what follows, Spicer’s theory of translation, central to his poetics of dictation, becomes a trigger point for a debate between Blaser and Duncan around their translations of Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet sequence Les Chimères (1973). When the two poets were first introduced to one another by Jack Spicer in 1946, they began a lifelong friendship that would have deep consequences for the poetry each would write over the next several decades. While they shared similar sensibilities that were drawn to cosmological sources and mythic readings of poetic practice as incantation and magic, Duncan and Blaser nonetheless possessed distinctly different understandings of poetic language and the role of the poet in shaping (or translating) that language onto the page. For Duncan, language inevitably involves a sense of “numinous revelation” of an “immediate event” that reveals the universal as enacted in the particular. “The poem,” he writes in his 1964 essay, “Towards an Open Universe,” “comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity” (Selected Prose 3). In this dance, language is logos, a source resonant with the godly presence central to all acts of human endeavor. By contrast, Blaser and Spicer share an affinity in their exploration of translation of the poem as dictation. The poet’s task in translation is one of mediating those cosmic forces that exist “outside” the poet and allowing the poem and its language to become the dictated content of an encounter between Self and Other. In contrast to the immanentist outlook Duncan proposes, Spicer’s and Blaser’s work in poetry suggest a break or fracture, where an articulable self—and language— once stood. Spicer’s concept of poetic process as a form of dictation, one that had an enormous influence on Blaser, involves a complex folding of

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subjectivity and the real into a language that remains at once the poet’s own and that of an outside. Tracing this boundary between the dualisms of self and other, the object and its image, Spicer and Blaser occupy a decidedly post-humanist space of poetic practice. Arising from what Blaser describes as the “broken and reforming language which composes a ‘real’ ” (Spicer, Collected Books 275), the poem doesn’t so much verify personal and/or cosmic realities as renew our ongoing attention to the language of their discovery. For Duncan and Blaser, then, the terms of engagement in these somewhat differing (as well as overlapping) notions of poiesis were most fully brought to the fore in the events and public debate (albeit one-sided) that surrounded publication of their translations of Nerval. Here, Duncan’s and Blaser’s different readings of French Romanticism, Poundian translation strategy, and poetic language and form were situated in a context of personal rivalry, sexual politics, and communal factionalism that in themselves deeply informed the writing and dissemination of these translations. And, as I will suggest, these two poets’ responses form an intricate and perceptible link between two halves of the New American poetry, two versions of modernist poetic practice. The stances that developed as a result of Duncan’s and Blaser’s disagreement cannot be separated from the larger issues of poetic subjectivity and masculinity that these translations traverse as part of the “dissonant companionship in poetry” (Spicer, Collected Books 289). II Translation is the sheer play of difference: it constantly makes allusion to difference, dissimulates difference, but by occasionally revealing and often accentuating it, translation becomes the very life of this difference, and it is under the spell of this difference that translation discovers its august duty whenever it proudly sets out to bring the two languages closer together through its own power of unification, a power like that of Hercules drawing together the two shores of the sea. —Maurice Blanchot

In 1965, while Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser were both still living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Blaser’s translations of Nerval’s Les Chimères were published by the San Francisco based press Open Space. Duncan, who also held an interest in Nerval’s poems but had never translated them, ultimately had a harsh reaction to this work, describing it as alternately “irresponsible” and a “perversion” of Nerval. By way of a response, Duncan attempted his

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own translations of Les Chimères. These poems, along with Duncan’s extensive commentary and long portions of the letters that passed between the two poets at the time, were later gathered together by Duncan and printed in a special issue of Audit, a small magazine published out of Buffalo and edited by Michael Anania and Charles Doria. Tracking the various elements of this dispute more than forty years later is a formidable and in some ways conjectural task. Little material outside of what was published in Audit exists to document this episode; the rest of the story has passed into “lore,” known and remembered mostly by those who lived in and traveled through the Berkeley poetry community of the mid-to-late 1960s. In discussing the available correspondence and the translations themselves, I shall focus on two main components of this disagreement and briefly touch upon a third: first, the instigative role that Duncan and Blaser’s relationship at the time played in this dispute; second, the differing translation strategies used by these writers in their work on Nerval; and third, the historic shift this moment represented both for the Bay Area poetry communities in particular and the New American poetries in general. Both the letters and Duncan’s often scathing commentary record a moment of serious rift—of disaffiliation—in the relationship between Duncan and Blaser. Indeed, as their correspondence with each other painfully illustrates, while issues of poiesis emphatically were at stake, they were so thoroughly implicated in a tangle of personal resentments, jealousies, and anger that any easy separation of the interpersonal and the poetic is all but impossible. While the main focus of my discussion will be on the translations themselves (i.e., the work produced amidst what otherwise can be described as a crisis of friendship), it is useful to keep in mind the ways in which, for both Duncan and Blaser, the reach of this event lay in its claim to the intimacies and nuances of their own complex relation to one another. Duncan’s anger, so evident in this exchange, and Blaser’s reluctance—refusal really—to take up the challenge of Duncan’s charges of “irresponsibility” and “carelessness” result in a curiously uneven match of wills and intents. Duncan’s descriptions of Blaser’s translations as “perverted” and “wildly deviant” (Audit 43) additionally suggest a backdrop of sexually configured resentment and antagonism that served as an ulterior staging ground for Duncan’s acerbic analysis of Blaser’s work on Nerval. Indeed, the linkage of sexual perversion with an act of “irresponsible” translation denotes something of the highly charged nature of this exchange and its echoing of unspecified incidents earlier in the two men’s relationship.

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At least some of Duncan’s outrage would seem to have stemmed from Blaser’s break-up in 1962 with his partner of several years, Jim Felts, and subsequent relationship with Stan Persky, who would later become Blaser’s publisher. Duncan, who had been in a relatively stable domestic relationship with the painter Jess Collins since 1950, apparently felt threatened by the swiftness with which Blaser was able to end one “marriage” and enter into another. His harsh judgment of Blaser no doubt resulted in part from an internal panic, brought on by doubts he experienced as he wrestled with his own desire for freedom from the ties of domesticity. Projecting onto Blaser his fears and longings, Duncan seems to have found no adequate outlet for his anger—other than to accuse Blaser in print of violations that went right to the heart of their dispute.1 Another context for the fierceness of Duncan’s response lies in Blaser’s relationship to Spicer. Specifically, Duncan seems to have regarded as a betrayal Blaser’s failure to shift poetic loyalties to him in the wake of Jack Spicer’s death in August 1965. Again, the particular details of personal relationships at this time are complex, somewhat occluded, and often irrecoverable. But it does bear noting that Duncan’s initial reaction to Blaser’s translations as presented at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965 was positive. As Duncan himself notes in his discussion in Audit, “The boldness and beauty of that reading is memorable, for Blaser read with a dramatic defiance, conveying the mood of an injured spirit” (52). Only later, after Spicer had died leaving Blaser as his literary executor, did Duncan become actively critical of Blaser’s translations. In part, Duncan may have been motivated by resentment over Blaser’s refusal to toe the line, as it were, and align himself more fully with Duncan’s poetic program. In addition, Blaser and Duncan seem to have been engaging in a complicated competition over who was the rightful heir to Spicer’s poetic legacy. While a sense of fraternity and mutually explored magic and eros suffuses the language of Duncan’s 1964 “Sonnet 3” (derived from Dante)—“Robin, it would be a great thing if you, me, and Jack Spicer / Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turnd” (Duncan, Roots 124)—these lines don’t suggest the very real ways in which elements of discord and disaffection permeated these entangled borrowings from and relations to one another. Duncan’s assumption of the role of master poet, his chastising in print of Blaser for his failure to produce a cogent poetics to defend his work on Nerval, and Blaser’s own anguished response to Duncan all need to be seen, then, in the context of interpersonal relations and choices within poetic careers. It was certainly Duncan’s intention that this dispute be made part of the public record. As Duncan writes toward the end of his lengthy commentary

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in Audit, “The whole now has been sent off to AUDIT to accompany my translation of Nerval’s Les Chimères, and I am much relieved to have disposed of the matter, bringing it into the active area of my published poetics” (60; italics added). His use of the words “active,” “published,” and “my” suggests the way in which Duncan saw the terms of his working through of Nerval (and Blaser via Nerval) as integral and central aspects of his poetic project. His push to bring his translations into the “open” realm of the published work echoes Olson’s dictum from “Projective Verse” to “USE USE USE the process at all points” (17). Blaser’s somewhat muted response at the time stems in part from the fact that he was never given the opportunity to respond in print to Duncan’s charges. As he related in a 1991 taped interview with Ralph Maud, Blaser was only partially aware of the extent of Duncan’s criticism and was presented with its publication in Audit as a fait accompli: “I was never given, I was never allowed to see anything beyond a sort of first protest. Audit magazine never sent me a copy or gave me an opportunity to reply.” The translations of Nerval that Duncan and Blaser produced during this period document fundamentally different notions of modernist translation practice, as well as divergent responses to the legacy of Ezra Pound. Pound’s development of interpretive translation strategies set forth in his versions of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel had a singular impact not only on Duncan and Blaser, but on the entire range of New American poets, including Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman. Lawrence Venuti, whose work has been pivotal to a comprehensive reappraisal of the development of modernist translation procedures, writes in The Translator’s Invisibility, “Modernism asserts the ‘independence’ of the translated text, demanding that it be judged on its ‘own’ terms, not merely apart from the foreign text, but against other literary texts in its ‘own’ language, accepting the ‘responsibility’ of distinguishing itself in the literary terms of that language” (188). But, as Venuti points out, such a view elides the ways in which modernist translation practice always involves a domestication of the source text, effacing difference and thereby privileging the cultural autonomy of the translated text over that of the original. Pound’s interpretive translation strategy, which ran counter to the precepts of modernist translation theory practiced earlier by Bunting, T.S. Eliot, and Pound himself, suggests an alternative mode, one that “contradicts the ideal of autonomy by pointing to the various conditions of the translated text, foreign as well as domestic, and thus makes clear that translation can make a cultural difference at home only by signifying the difference of the foreign text” (Venuti, Invisibility 202).

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While both Duncan and Blaser adhere to tenets of Poundian translation theory, their rather different approaches to Nerval suggest ways in which this affiliation is itself complicated and hardly total. Duncan writes in his Audit commentary, “Les Chimères seems to me completely realized, completely communicated, a whole in which each part is essential, form and content so related that the sequence may be taken, as indeed I take it, as a poem of process” (57). Following from this, Duncan’s assumption would seem to be that in translating such a work, the “completely realized, completely communicated” meanings of the original text may be not only fully preserved, but through careful adherence to the verbal equivalencies of source and target language, made available in the translation. In pointing to the divergences of Blaser’s language from Nerval’s and asserting that Blaser has failed to communicate “what the actual French words mean and how those meanings are actually composed” (49), Duncan suggests the potential for a transhistorical, one-to-one equivalence between Nerval’s nineteenth-century French and Blaser’s—or Duncan’s—twentieth-century North American English. Indeed, as Duncan makes clear throughout his statement, the primacy of Nerval’s source text was an article of faith; he viewed his role as that of auditor and aspirant to the universal meanings encoded in its language: What I experience in my extreme persuasion to the reality of the world created by the written and read word, where the meaning in language has its definitions in the community of meanings from which I derive whatever meanings I can, is at times a feeling that there is no real me, only the process of derivations in which I have my existence. (49)

Duncan’s sense of there being “no real me” suggests the degree to which his identity as a poet depended on linking himself with other strong poetic figures (Pound and H.D. are two notable examples). Only through this process could his own identity in language achieve actualization. Thus, in his translation of Nerval, it was altogether natural that the source text should exert the primary force on Duncan’s thinking; his task, as he understood it, was to produce a “rendering in English, closely and carefully responsible to the meanings and intent of the original” (43). He argues throughout his commentary that there remain definitive meanings to be derived from the original; the translator’s job is to get at these essential truths through close reading and scholarly apprehension of the source text. Blaser’s approach is notably less attached to the “affiliative” aspect of the relation between a poet and his or her translator, than to the intermediate space created in that disjunction between source text (and source author)

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and the translator. Rather than arguing for a linear movement from source text to translation, Blaser proposes a more interrogative mode, one that Philip Lewis has described as “that of the strong, forceful translation that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing his own” (41). Here, questions of authorial self, subjectivity, and source language versus target language are continually brought into play in the work of translation. Seeking to meet the “real” in Nerval’s poems, Blaser attends to both the thematic and historico-cultural content of these texts, while at the same time he attempts to negotiate a space that is on the borderline of the original, rather than its faithful counterpart. It is a mode of translation that parts company with Duncan’s more essentializing discourse and, in so doing, suggests the ways in which, as Venuti proposes, a translation “can never be a transparent representation, only an interpretive transformation that exposes multiple and divided meanings in the foreign text and displaces it with another set of meanings, equally multiple and divided” (Rethinking 8). Put another way, where Duncan insists on a kind of purist stance toward language and form in translation, Blaser argues for a far less stable model, a “flowing boundary” between poets and the “multiple and divided” languages that emerge in the act of translation (Spicer, Collected Books 306). The differences between Duncan’s and Blaser’s approaches to translation can be traced to the rift between translation practice as based in “derivation” (Duncan) or in “actuality” (Blaser). While both poets privilege the “autonomy” of the translation, to a degree that is telling Blaser emphasizes the process in which translator and poet are brought into relation through a “tie of the actual and the other.” As Blaser suggests in his 1968 essay “The Fire,” in language that strikingly parallels yet simultaneously departs from Pound’s in the 1910 introduction to his versions of Cavalcanti, “it is this content which must be translated—not the word for word crib, but the actual heat of the process which gave form to the poems” (28). Reading Pound, we find the following: “I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of that power which implies the man” (24). Clearly what Blaser has taken from Pound is an active interest in the “trace” that can be discerned, not “line by line,” but only through a meeting in “the actual heat of the process.” Duncan’s and Blaser’s readings of “originality” and “otherness” constitute primary points of disagreement, as each would seek in his translation to further different aspects of the Poundian project. As I will show in my discussion of the poems themselves, Blaser’s work is in some ways more assiduously

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than Duncan’s an act of “interpretive translation,” even as Duncan’s versions of Nerval share aspects of this same procedural basis. For Blaser, translation as practice and intellectual construct necessarily violates the dicta of transparency and authorial intent to forge a translational and textual space that is conjoint with the source text, while always signaling the profound differences—cultural, historic, linguistic—that separate source-text and translation. As I’ve already suggested, Duncan’s work in the translations reveal the ways in which, his statements on poetics notwithstanding, his Nerval was already necessarily at variance with and foreign to the “original.” Finally, Duncan’s version of Les Chimères is as much imbued with his own project of recovering elements of High Romanticism—as Blaser’s is in moving Nerval’s language to a similarly distant position from its original space in French-language culture. Duncan’s refusal to see the matter in these terms and his resolutely essentialist conception of translation practice form a curious lacuna of critical insight. At the same time, Duncan’s stance points to a disjunction between his stated aims in the pages of Audit and his enactment of the far more complicated versions of originality and authorial presence that we find in such texts as “Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake,” “After a Passage in Baudelaire,” and the Dante sonnet sequence cited earlier (all from Duncan’s 1964 collection Roots and Branches). In each of these, Duncan asserts an intertextual language that pays homage to its Romantic and Metaphysical sources, and relates the multiphasic properties of the poem and the ways in which derivation becomes a figure of poetic sensibility. Far from arguing for an unmediated original text or a resolutely “faithful” rendering of prior models (as he seems on occasion to be doing in Audit), Duncan elaborates on his construct of language as a repository of collaborative human endeavor. It is in this respect that his Nerval translations and the discussion that accompanies them usefully suggest a significant furthering of his commitment to a poetics of complexly interwoven, numinous identities and meanings.2 Without overstating the differences between Duncan and Blaser in their approaches to issues of poetic subjectivity and translation, I propose that rather than not caring for Nerval’s meaning (as Duncan repeatedly suggests in his discussion in Audit), Blaser pursued a different kind of meaning. The gaps and omissions in Blaser’s text exist, then, as representative spaces of a conscientiously enacted inarticulation and displacement, rather than the failed mis en scène Duncan describes. Beyond Duncan and Blaser’s fraught personal relations and their different approaches to issues of poetics, this episode in another sense signals the end of an era. The Berkeley Poetry Conference, held in the summer of 1965,

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where Blaser first read publicly from and Duncan first heard the translations of Les Chimères, marked a key shift in the Bay Area community. As Michael Davidson has noted, this conference was pivotal as a bringing together of those first-generation San Francisco based writers included in Allen’s anthology and primary Black Mountain figures such as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.3 At the same time, it marked the culmination of an era. Within a few years of the conference, core members of the San Francisco group had either moved away or died. Jack Spicer died of alcohol poisoning one month after his appearance at the conference in July, and the immediate members of his circle dispersed to various parts of the United States and Canada (Blaser, Stan Persky, and George Stanley to British Columbia; Helen Adam to New York; and Ebbe Borregaard to Bolinas). Duncan began spending more time in Stinson Beach on the Marin coast north of San Francisco, in the process distancing himself from the more chaotic scenes of North Beach and Haight-Ashbury. Duncan and Blaser’s break over the Nerval translations thus falls within the larger break-up of the various groups and camps that had until that time dominated the West Coast poetry scene. As such, the crisis in these two poets’ friendship with one another represents a formative instance of the interplay between poetic career, male subjectivity, and formalist concerns that would have long-lasting consequences for the direction avant-garde poetries in the United States would take in the years to come. III The sonnets that make up Les Chimères were first published together in 1854 as part of the volume Les Filles du Feu and included, in the order in which they appeared, “El Desdichado,” “Myrtho,” “Horus,” “Anteros,” “Delfica,” “Artemis,” “Le Christ aux Oliviers,” and “Vers Dorés.” Three of these, “Le Christ aux Oliviers,” Vers dorés,” and “Delfica,” were originally published together in 1853 under the title Mysticisme. Written over roughly a ten-year span, the sonnets together suggest a coherent body of work, each poem containing echoes of and allusions to the other poems in the series. Notable for their difficulty and obscurity, the sonnets suggest a multiplicity of private, textual, mythological, and cultural sources, including events from Nerval’s own life; his readings in classic Greek, Roman, and Romantic German literature (notably Heine and Goethe); and his extensive explorations of alchemy, astrology, and the tarot. “El Desdichado,” which Nerval placed at the beginning of Les Chimères but which (based on the evidence of his manuscripts) actually seems to have been written last, was first published in 1853 in Alexandre Dumas’s journal Le Mousquetaire. It remains central to the entire series and next to “Artémis,” the sonnet that has elicited the most attention. Introducing the

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thematic and symbolic motifs of the fear of and desire for Woman, the loss and resumption of faith, and the rejection of reality in favor of the ideal, “El Desdichado” looks both ahead and backward to the other poems in the series. Aptly enough, it is the sonnet that Duncan has the most to say about in his remarks in Audit, “Returning to Les Chimères of Gérard de Nerval.” It is also the one poem in which Blaser, as he relates in the note that followed his translations in their Open Space edition, sought to keep the “shape” of Nerval’s poem, generally adhering to the line breaks and stanzas of the source text. This is a practice that in the later Chimères Blaser would depart from, sometimes to radical effect. Here is Nerval’s text, followed by Duncan’s and Blaser’s translations as they appeared, respectively, in the pages of Audit and the Open Space publication. Nerval: “El Desdichado” Je suis le ténébreux,—le veuf,—l’inconsolé, Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie: Ma seule étoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé, Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie. Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé, Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie, La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé, Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie. Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? . . . Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; J’ai rêve dans la grotte où nage la syrene . . . Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron: Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée. Duncan: “The Disinherited” I am the dark one,—the widower,—the unconsoled, The Prince of Aquitaine at his stricken tower: My sole star is dead,—and my constellated lute Bears the black sun of the Melencolia. In the night of the tomb, thou who consoled me Give me back Mount Posilipo and the Italian sea, The flower which pleased so my desolate heart, And the trellis where the grape vine unites with the rose.

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Am I Amor or Phoebus? . . . Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen; I have dreamd in the grotto where the mermaid swims . . . And two times victorious I have crosst the Acheron: Modulating turn by turn on the lyre of Orpheus The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.4 Blaser: “The Shadow” I am the Darkness the Widowed the Unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine in his broken tower, my only Star is dead and my lustrous lute carries a melancholy black sun in the night of death, You who consoled me, give back the high hill above the Mediterranean, the flower which pleased my desolated heart so much, and the arbor where the vine branch unites with the rose am I Amor or Apollo? my forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss I have dreamed in the Grotto where the Siren swims I have crossed Acheron twice, a winner, modulating the sighs of a saint and the cries of a fairy turn by turn on Orpheus’ lyre

Beginning with the titles, one notes significant differences between these two translations. Following its roots in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, Duncan translates the Spanish “El Desdichado” as “the disinherited,” while Blaser, working off the homophonic sense of “dichado,” translates it as “the shadow.”5 Holding strictly to Nerval’s internal punctuation, Duncan maintains the use of the em-dash in the first and third lines, while Blaser replaces these with blank spaces or lacunae, which can suggest both a measure of breath and a gap in meaning and relation. Other differences emerge in their choices in diction. Here again, Duncan maintains a closer fidelity to Nerval’s language. Duncan’s “the black sun of the Melencolia” follows Nerval’s emphases in “le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie,” while Blaser’s “a melancholy black sun” is both less specific and more “ordinary.” Similarly, Duncan offers a literal translation of “tombeau” in the fifth line as “tomb,” whereas Blaser renders it as “death.” In the sixth line, Duncan reproduces “le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie” as “Mount Posilipo and the Italian Sea,” in contrast to Blaser’s “the high hill above the Mediterranean.” Duncan also maintains the entire set of

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mythical and historical allusions contained in the opposing pairs of Amor and Phoebus, Lusignan and Biron. Significantly, Blaser drops the second pair entirely, while translating “Phébus” as the more commonly known “Apollo.”6 Finally, while Blaser holds to the order of lines throughout the rest of his translation, at the end he inverts the phrases “tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée” (“turn by turn on Orpheus’s lyre”) and “les soupirs de la sainte et les cris” (“the sighs of a saint and the cries”), thus forcing the enjambment of “cries / of a fairy,” as opposed to the more “natural” phrasal break of Nerval’s lines. In keeping as he does to a strict observance of Nerval’s particular language, Duncan strives to maintain the elevated and mystical vocabulary of the original. Yet in choosing to accentuate the Romantic dimension of Nerval’s text and preserve antiquated diction (as with “thou,” “crosst,” and “fay”), he reveals an important disjunction between his avowed aim of giving a translation of Nerval that would provide “a rendering in English, closely and carefully responsible to the meanings and intent of the original” (43) and the actual poem that he has produced. By his own account, Duncan “felt the need to bring the formulae of Nerval’s poetry over into my own experience in language” (46), a statement suggesting that while he sought to honor the etymological and syntactic particularities of Nerval’s poem, the “experience in language” was necessarily Duncan’s, not Nerval’s. The Keatsian and Tennysonian tones of Duncan’s language honor the deep romanticism of his own procedural and imaginative biases. In effect, Duncan’s translation domesticates Nerval’s original by reinvesting its midnineteenth-century French with the vocabulary and discourse of the English Romantic tradition. At the same time, in Duncan’s attempt to match Nerval’s semantic meaning word-for-word, the language of “The Disinherited” occasionally acquires a somewhat labored, metronomic quality. In his insistence upon fluidity and musicality (a musicality that depends heavily upon iambic meter), Duncan doesn’t allow for a reading that would bring forward those more perceptibly “awkward” or unmusical aspects of language that might more adequately signal the work’s status as a translation. Again, one needs to draw the distinction between transparent and abusive fidelity to the source text. For instance, Nerval’s line “La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé” is translated in Duncan’s version as “The flower which pleased so my desolate heart,” and in Blaser’s as “the flower which pleased my desolated heart so much.” Duncan criticizes Blaser’s language here as “a rendering which has itself been desolated from grace” (55), even as he notes the gain in the offrhyme of “branch” in the succeeding line. But Duncan misses here the way that Blaser’s approach, signaled by various changes in syntax, phrasing, and word choice, succeeds in moving his translation away from Nerval’s highly wrought and manifestly symbolic linguistic surface toward a less gestural,

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if also less overtly lyric, language. As Gerrit Lansing has noted, “It is a savage contemporary language we hear” (87) in this work, discordant, nonfamiliar, violent, and disruptive.7 In effect, Blaser openly violates the precepts of transparency to wrest the poem away from its privileged position as a received text of French symbolism and bring forward another language— one that allows for other meanings to emerge, separate and tangibly distant from Nerval’s. As the documents in Audit clearly illustrate, it was exactly along these lines that the misunderstanding between Duncan and Blaser proceeded. Looking for the actual language and essential meaning of Nerval in Blaser, Duncan found only Blaser, a situation that seems to have become intolerable over the months that he worked on his own translations. In a very real way, the struggle for precise meaning so painstakingly narrated by Duncan in his commentary was itself a struggle for “possession” of Nerval and, more importantly, a concerted effort to take him away from Blaser. That Duncan resolutely followed through on his attack suggests the depth of his anger over how Blaser had struck out on his own and found his Nerval, a figure whose actuality in the translations remained for each of these poets a differently composed matter of fundamental belief. The documents and commentary on Nerval appear in an issue of Audit devoted to the work of Duncan and featuring a cover photograph of the poet by Nata Piaskowski. The issue opens with Duncan’s A Play with Masks, dedicated to Paul Alexander, and follows with “NARRATION for concert reading version of ADAM’S WAY,” “Miscellaneous Uncollected Pieces” (“A Derivation from Rimbaud,” “A Game of Kings,” “A Vilanelle,” “Alteration”), “Uncollected Stein Imitations from the Period of Writing Writing,” and seven other short poems before the translations of Nerval that are accompanied by Duncan’s commentary and end notes. It is interesting that all of this work appears in an issue that in 1967 takes a retrospective look at Duncan’s career, with the earliest piece, “A Derivation from Rimbaud,” dating from 1948 and the latest, “Some Versions of Passages 26,” which concludes the issue, from 1965 and 1966. The staging ground, then, for Duncan’s translations of Nerval and his appraisal of Blaser’s translations is a careful gathering of poems that offers a minibildung of Duncan’s poetic development. In this and other respects, Duncan’s contribution to this issue of the journal represents a clear instance of career-making, using the occasion of Audit’s publication to narrate a progression, if you will, from ephebe to mastery. The alignment with Nerval positions Duncan in a curiously heterodox space of French romantic and symbolist poetries, Steinian modernism, and contemporary avant-garde expression.

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Appearing as it does without prefatory matter or introduction, the Nerval section has a strangely performative quality to it, with the quoted correspondence of Blaser and Duncan interjected between lengthy portions of Duncan’s commentary. There is throughout a highly managed quality to these documents, arranged as they are in more or less chronological order and giving a narration of events that concludes with a letter to Blaser, dated April 23, 1966, in which Duncan sums up the events of the preceding year, providing a coda, as it were, to the disaffection that developed between the two poets. This letter also serves as a fitting preface to the closing piece in the issue, which begins: “They take their souls in war / as we take soul in the poem” (62). Here, it’s important to emphasize again how Duncan pursues a course that blends all aspects of his visionary poetics, bringing together elements of his own career in poetry with adroit and extensive commentary to engage Blaser in combat—no less real for its existence as a figurative site within Duncan’s poetics. Duncan indicates in the course of his discussion in Audit that his initial decision to translate Nerval’s sonnets came shortly after the appearance of Blaser’s poems in their Open Space publication: Disturbed . . . I talked to him of my troubles with the first poem within a day or so of my beginning to question his work. Wasn’t it essential to the poem to keep the terms of its experience—the Black Sun of the gnostic universe, the engraving by Dürer that had fascinated Nerval because he thought he saw the Black Sun there . . . Wasn’t it important to keep the name Posilipo that was so important to Nerval and the term the Sea? I told him that I felt now that I must undertake a study and translation of Nerval myself, for, whatever else he had done, Blaser had not given a satisfactory translation. (45)

Duncan’s move from the outset, then, was toward a contention for the “originating author”—whose connection to himself and his own mythopoeic imagination allowed Duncan to establish his mastery not only over Blaser, but, in a sense, over Nerval as well. Duncan suggests that it is he who knows what Nerval knew, valued, and saw; thus, the “engraving by Dürer” becomes at once Nerval’s and Duncan’s, held between them through Duncan’s authorial positioning of himself at the scene of the creation. While there is certainly biographical evidence to support each of Duncan’s claims regarding the way Nerval arrived at his poems, the point here is that for Duncan the credibility of his own account rested primarily on an unwavering belief in his experience of the Nervalian world. That Blaser sought a different world—a different Nerval—became intolerable. Duncan’s hostility to Blaser’s approach is evident in his extensive

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commentary, as he attacked not only the flaws in Blaser’s translations, but their very linguistic, intellectual, and subjective premises. The autocratic note that many of Duncan’s comments in Audit strike has as much to do with the (avowedly large) value Duncan placed on his knowledge as an initiate into Nervalian mysteries, as with his dissatisfaction over the choices Blaser had made in his translation—choices that inevitably propose a radically different vision of Nerval. Following his initial receptivity to them, Duncan viewed Blaser’s translations as both a disturbance and a provocation—a challenge, in a sense, to his own understanding of Nerval. That Blaser’s poems provided part of the originating impulse behind Duncan’s decision to go ahead with his translations of Nerval is important in that it points to how Duncan needed to frame the entire disagreement in terms of a challenge and a competition between the two men. Duncan’s comments suggest something of the personal animus that drove him to attempt translations of work to which he too had a deep attachment. Reviewing his initial intentions, Duncan writes: “The truth of the matter was that my reading was in search of Nerval, not of Blaser” (46). Blaser’s disappointed and defensive reaction to this implicit rebuke can be felt in his letter of November 16, 1965, as he attempts to respond to some of Duncan’s criticisms: Dear Robert, If you want a literal translation of Les Chimères, see the Penguin. I find it impossible to understand how a reading of my translations could be interpreted as “removing the hermetic.” . . . My note in the back of the book explains that I made decisions about the meaning of the poems, and did my best to make that complete, so long as they were my poems. Not enough attention is being given to the months long effort to keep my language real, so that the tie of the actual and the other is absolutely real. A Reality. I do ask that my translations be read for what they accomplish, because what they intend to accomplish is there and worth your effort and everybody else’s. Once that’s done, I will, of course, welcome your translations as separate poems, separate from mine, separate from Nerval. I’m very angry about not being read. The whole design of the book is made to force a reading of these as poems. Now as for this lack of the Hermetic level: I made the decision to read melancholy black sun: if I lose one thing I’ve gained another. The Posilipo remains in the poem for the careful reader: what high hill above the Med. has a grotto? I even know its length. Robin8

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I shall discuss the various particulars of Blaser’s response to Duncan’s critique shortly. For now, I want to draw attention to Blaser’s emphasis on his “months long effort to keep my language real,” for it reemphasizes the crucial difference in these two poets’ approaches. As Blaser’s handwritten addition of the phrase “A Reality” to his otherwise typewritten letter indicates, for him translation necessarily serves other purposes than those of attempting to mirror or otherwise re-present the source text or the source author—a fact that Duncan clearly chooses to ignore in his comments. Rather, in his effort to explore the differences between his and Blaser’s translations, Duncan engaged in a process that, as he reports it, forced him to “become more and more engrossed in Nervalian studies” (46). With this scholarly work undertaken, Duncan obviously felt he was in a secure position to attack Blaser’s translations on a number of criteria, including their infidelity to the source text, their irresponsible treatment of subject matter and language, and their failure to honor adequately the terms of Nerval’s intentions. Duncan’s November 18 response to Blaser’s letter of November 16 is astringent and admonitory. Its importance as a document of Duncan’s poetics and as commentary on his relation to Blaser at the time warrants quoting it at length: Dear Robin/ I don’t think you should be angry at “not being read.” It is one of the courtesies of the publisht work that one leaves reading up to the reader. Certainly you may be angry at being mis-read, and I hope that you will be generous in correcting my readings of your intentions and work. But surely, a close study and a critical comparison of your translation (which you so specifically deny to be a “version”) with Nerval’s text in order to search out the nature of the “omissions and interpretations” which you speak of is the beginning—a most serious beginning—of your being read . . . I think I am on the right track to take it that your revisions are critical decisions and have meaning then at a level from which we may arrive at poetic principles involved. I am not saying here that there are not points at which you would make no choice but would keep the challenge of contradictories (as, for instance, you do, when you insist that your rendition is a translation and, at the same time, that you have had to make them your own). What I mean to do in a critical reading is to find what has happened between the text of Nerval and your text in this process of making it your own. At this point, having completed a first draft of a translation of Nerval, striving to render his meaning, I am convinced that in every case of change, Nerval, not you, is the illuminating one. Two kinds of things seem to happen in your

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“emendations” of the text towards an “absolutely real” poetry of your own. First, there is in places a loss of content simply because, rejecting Nerval’s source in his life (biography!) experience (mysticism!) or in his studies, you do not see the import of his picture of sign . . . Second, and this too concerns me, there is revision of content which I take (in justice to your three months’ work) not to be missing the content but to be critical opposition to and then elimination of basic concepts at work in Nerval’s poetics. It is because I hold these basic concepts most essential to the good of our art as poets, because I find these to be truths and Nerval’s text to be gospel [italics added], that I undertake to restore them and to contest the text which you present. I do not mean to make my translations as you would invite me to do when you write—“I will, of course, welcome your translations, separate from mine, separate from Nerval.” No, Robin, I cannot separate my translations from Nerval’s text, for what it would accomplish is there in the French, for I mean to write in search of the meanings of Les Chimères . . . (47–8)

The brunt of Duncan’s criticism here, as elsewhere in his notes and commentary, is directed at those changes or omissions that he regards as perversions of Nerval’s original text. Duncan responds with persuasive authority in a tone that ranges from acerbic to outraged, as he faults Blaser for “revision of content” that most directly marks (and mars) Blaser’s work on Les Chimères. Playing up his role as the older, more established poet (Duncan had by this time several books and other publications to his credit; Blaser was still in the relatively early stages of his career), Duncan takes Blaser to task for failing to uphold the tradition of Poetry that he (Duncan) understood as central to his own poetics, a tradition deeply invested in Gnostic and hermetic principles and steeped in these as formative aspects of poiesis. It is deeply telling that Duncan refers to Nerval’s texts as “gospel,” suggesting the biblical status these poems hold for him as texts of “primary” (i.e., organic) meaning. This is, of course, a long way from Blaser’s situating of Nerval and his language in a set of contexts in which “the tie of the actual and the other is absolutely real.” Where Duncan maintains a deferential—one could also say reverential—stance toward authorial intent and the original text, Blaser’s comments suggest a more skeptical and resolutely distanced approach in which the foreign elements encountered in the source text are neither passed over nor devotedly transferred to the new work. Rather, the translation provides an account of its difference, bringing to the fore gaps and rifts between source and target language. What emerges from this exchange is less a faithful rendering of the original (Duncan’s ostensible concern) than a necessarily differentiated text of variegated meanings.

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Duncan’s commentary in Audit and Blaser’s response are best understood, then, in the context of these relations between poet and language and between translator and source text. Duncan’s criticism is principally based, as I’ve suggested, on what he regards as Blaser’s willful mistranslation of Nerval’s text, one that omits or underplays the mystical, hermetic, and mythological content of the original. Strenuously insisting on the necessity of preserving each and every aspect of Nerval’s terminology, Duncan cites Blaser’s decision to ignore the italics of “le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie” as indicative of the ways in which Blaser appropriates those aspects of Nerval’s meaning that he finds useful, while ignoring others that don’t concern him. Accusing Blaser of seeking to “purify” Nerval’s poem from biographical and mythical “contamination” (Duncan’s language here is significant, with its emphasis on bodily function, health, and disease), Duncan notes the change in “la nuit du tombeau” and the replacement of “mer” (sea) with “Mediterranean” and suggests that in these signal alterations, Blaser limits or bypasses altogether the alchemical vocabulary that Duncan views as fundamental to Nerval’s intent and meaning. Finally, Duncan disparages Blaser for his dropping of “Lusignan ou Biron” in the ninth line, viewing this move also as destructive to Nerval’s carefully architected mythic edifice, represented in the chiasmic pairing of Amor and Phoebus, Lusignan and Biron. Reading the entire sonnet sequence as one whose meanings are incontrovertibly bound up with Nerval’s own idiomatic translation of hermeticism and mysticism, Duncan argues the need to preserve “the exact terms, names, numbers and sequences” of the source text (44). While Duncan was certainly right to point out the differences in content and meaning between Blaser’s translation and Nerval’s poem, interestingly he jettisons the possibility that the mythological, hermetic, and other sources he finds so important may not be, in fact, the primarily meaningful aspects of these poems after all. As Blaser makes clear on more than one occasion in the correspondence and in the note that followed the translations in their Open Space publication, he was just as aware as Duncan of Nerval’s complexly woven meanings, his roots in ancient Greek mythology, the tarot, occultism, and hermetic lore. But as Blaser put the matter in his letter to Duncan of November 20: The sense that Nerval knew these things, had learned them, and here argued them, stayed with me throughout . . . I searched until I understood every reference, and then decided the extensive biographical notes, which I had planned, were unnecessary—that the mysterious and the personal (also mysterious and you’re right to say no longer personal) were entirely fused.

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Blaser’s comments here situate his translation in a nexus of carefully understood allusions; his remarks suggest that Nerval’s meanings were present, even in their absence. For Blaser, the references continue to exert a force on the translation and, as such, exist in the new poem as traces, meaningful residue of the source text’s language and content. “I regret the loss of The Melancholy,” Blaser writes in the same letter, “but thought the hermetic black sun there on his lute. Not a mood, but there.” In contrast to Duncan’s insistence that “the architectonics of the meaning of the poem” depends upon the translation of every reference, for Blaser, Nerval’s language and images exist as continuing forces of the real, even if (as Duncan takes great pains to point out) certain words and phrases are “missing,” “erased” in the course of translation (43). Returning to the quote from Spicer that serves as an epigraph for this chapter, Blaser honors a different code of ethics here, one in which he “is a time mechanic not an embalmer.” The richness of Blaser’s translation lies in its refusal to enforce the kind of one-to-one relation between source text and translation that Duncan, in his more dogmatic approach, calls for. Refusing the easier accuracy of Duncan’s model, Blaser establishes a line of inquiry in this work that proceeds from the “outside,” carrying Nerval forward, just as Spicer had carried Lorca forward: through the deliberate and painful mutability of a language held up as mirror. As Duncan well understood, Blaser’s choices (his “omission” of the references to Lusignan, Biron, and Posilipo, for instance) were not reckless; they represented decisions in sound and meaning that go to the heart of these men’s differences as poet-translators—and to their variously composed understandings of Nerval’s intentions and “translatability.” “I take it there are no mistranslations at crucial points,” Duncan writes, “at least not in any sense that Blaser had not studied out Nerval’s text, and, if Blaser departs from its sense, he does so deliberately” (56). In holding so closely to the literal content levels of Nerval’s text, as he does throughout his considered comments, Duncan attends to a view that sticks to the theological, mythic, and etymological meanings of these poems, without considering how Nerval might otherwise be understood, apart from such contexts. For it most certainly remains an open question to what extent the meanings of Les Chimères are incontrovertibly bound by their roots in the various literary, mythological, and personal sources to which the sonnets refer. While Nerval’s invocation of such literary and mythical figures as Apollo, Lusignan, and Virgil would seem to be essential to his meaning, it is also true that these references provide only marginal access to an understanding of his texts. As Blaser recognized, thematizing and cross-referencing these poems provide only

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one facet of meaning and finally lock the translation into a systematized set of sources, without relevance to the “actualities” and energies of the poems’ language. In key respects, Blaser is echoing Antonin Artaud’s discussion of Les Chimères from his letter of 1946 to Georges Le Breton. This letter, originally written in draft form in notebooks and never sent, was nevertheless well known by Blaser, who had been working with Artaud’s text during this time and whose translation of it appeared in the same issue of Pacific Nation as “The Fire.” In part, the letter reads: The proof of the meaning of the lines of Les Chimères cannot be made from Mythology, alchemy, the Tarots, mysticism, or the dialectics and semantics of psycho-surgery, but uniquely, it can be drawn from the syntax. All his lines were written to be heard aloud, to be made concrete by the fullness of the voice, and it is not just that their music illuminates them and that read aloud, they can then speak by simple modulations of sound, sound by sound, since it is only off the printed or written page that an authentic line can make sense: the space of the breath between the flight of every word is necessary. The words escape from the page and launch themselves. They fly from the poet whose heart pushes them with the force of an attack hardly communicable, which holds them no longer inside his sonnets except by the power of assonance,—to sound outside in an identical costume but on a base of hostility. (69)

Wresting the poetic text from its basis in literary, cultural, and mythological sources, indeed, from print language itself, Artaud positions Nerval’s meaning in a profound eruption of sound that is beyond sense, occurring deep within the poet’s body. Arguing that in taking “refuge in the criticism of the sources” critics like Le Breton have missed the vital “coming into being” that is the greater work of Nerval’s poetry, Artaud suggests a reading that all but dismisses the traditional categories of reading and criticism by which one may be said to “know” a text (69). In calling attention to sound and those untranslatable forces that provide the poem’s real momentum, Artaud insists upon a space outside of and beyond the literal surface of the text—as well as outside of and beyond the control of the poet. Artaud’s theoretical considerations as outlined here seem to have been a primary instigation for Blaser’s own procedures in translating “El Desdichado” and the other sonnets of Les Chimères. For in his regard for a less literal, yet no less exacting, reading of Nerval, Blaser builds upon Artaud’s main argument here: Nerval’s sources must be understood for what they are—his sources; they cannot govern one’s entire response to the work. Indeed, as Blaser’s effort in “The Shadow”

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illustrates, translating the image content of Nerval’s language remained the more difficult and far less easily articulated task. IV The image remains central to Nerval’s working through of symbolic and biographical materials in “El Desdichado” and the other sonnets of Les Chimères. Yet as Norma Rinsler points out, Nerval’s images can hardly be said to correspond in any linear or plainly literal fashion to their sources: In the poetry of Nerval, the image occupies a privileged place. Most of his images are drawn from the common stock of European literature: names of places, names of gods, familiar elements of landscape, allusions to well-known legends and myths. Yet their mode of operation is peculiar to Nerval. If he mentions a legendary hero, or even so commonplace an object as a star or a flower, these things acquire a strongly personal significance through the context in which the poet has placed them: extract them from the words which accompany them in the sonnet, and they lose their identity. The effect of this is to create in the reader a sense that the poem is a world in itself, peopled by images which belong to that world and no other. (36)

The personalization of images described here is a commonplace of symbolist methodology. But Rinsler’s discussion usefully reconsiders the ways in which Duncan and Blaser separate over the meanings conveyed through the highly specific images of Nerval’s poem. Returning to the line “le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie,” we can see that for Duncan the meaning of this image lies in his perception of its word-forword actuality in Nerval’s text. Duncan is adamant that the precision of Nerval’s carefully chosen allusions and references is what is at stake. Their reality, not Blaser’s, forms the brunt of Duncan’s critique here: If a melancholy black sun was more real in his own language than the Black Sun that, in the obsession of Nerval’s language, Nerval thought he saw in Dürer’s Melencolia I, and if the Black Sun of gnostic mysticism and then of Romantic poetry means little or nothing to Blaser, then he keeps the tie of what he himself judges to be real between the actual and the other. Wherever Nerval’s world has to do with entities that do not satisfy Blaser’s own criteria of the real actual and the real other in his own terms, Blaser is conservative of his own reality at the cost of making “omissions and interpretations” to make Nerval’s poem fit that reality. (52)

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Targeting Blaser as poetically “conservative,” Duncan argues for a recognition of Nerval based almost entirely in actual perception of the consciousness of the dead poet, a point emphasized by his own near-obsessional reference to “Nerval’s language,” “Nerval thought,” “Nerval’s world,” and so on. And, if Blaser is the conservative one, that leaves Duncan as the poetically and politically liberal agent pushing for the real and the authentic, with the implicit criticism that Blaser wants to hold onto the familiar, the known, the unchallenged in a process that seeks to make Nerval fit Blaser’s own reality. Duncan, not Blaser, becomes the one who meets the real real in Nerval. Contested here, apart from the very different stances the two poets assume toward Nerval, is the meaning that each individual image acquires in the poem. In Duncan’s formulation, it is only through the translator’s scholarly apprehension and reinscribing of the etymological, biographical, and historical sources of the poem that the translation can be said to have succeeded. The poem’s images, then, closely linked with those sources Duncan identifies as “actual,” must be understood in the terms by which Nerval arrived at them. The translator, knowing the particular “event” to which each image refers, has no choice in the matter (if he is to render a faithful account of the original) but to acknowledge and reproduce the exact language of the source text’s imagery. Blaser sets forth his own decidedly different view in “The Fire,” which forms a kind of counterargument to Duncan’s criticism in Audit. For Blaser, his work was from the outset dual in nature: both a meeting of the actual language of Nerval’s text and an attempt to “carry over” into English “the heat of the Nerval world.” As he describes the matter in an already quoted portion of that essay: It is this content which must be translated—not the word for word crib, but the actual heat of the process which gave form to the poems. Nerval begins in a real image of loss—the women of his world who disappear into the earth, and if they continue to exist, the realms of death have to be seen in terms of change and in images which hold that change. (28)

The various shifts in literal meaning in Blaser’s translation, then, occur as meaningfully enacted movements toward those aspects of Nerval that cannot be easily codified by their origin in literary or mythological sources. The personal event of the image remains linked to a processive reading and reinscription of the poem in which image and language correspond as meaningful points of contact. Their “reality” depends upon one’s recognition of the “actual heat” that brought forth the poem in the first place.

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Blaser’s response to Duncan’s quoting of Ben Jonson—“Who knows not picture, knows not poetry”—insists upon a reading of the image not as a literal and totalized depiction, but as a process of encounter and actualized presence. Thus, where Duncan faults Blaser for omitting “constellated” from his translation and replacing it with “lustrous,” Blaser responds that the force behind his use of lustrous carried within it the picture of constellated—an image less dependent on a reading of Nerval’s intent than on a speculative meeting of the original in the space of the “new” work. Rather than relying on the source content to fulfill the terms of the image, as described in Pound’s well-known formulation of it (“an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”), Blaser suggests that the meaning of any one image is found in that intermediate space in which language, self, and other co-operate and co-respond. Blaser remains less interested in the “word for word crib” (itself a fairly fierce rejection of Duncan’s concerns) than in that quality of attention, that “transference of energy,” by which images from outside become actualized inside the poem and its language. The specificity of naming and reference, central as it is to Duncan’s reading, does not disappear from Blaser’s engagement with the source text; rather, this particularity becomes folded into a complex renegotiation of authorial imagination and textual realities that perceptibly informs the act of translation. The questions proposed here and throughout Blaser’s translations of Les Chimères (implicitly, because they are never directly stated in his own commentary on the matter) would seem to be these: Given that one can arrive at the literal level of the text via a dictionary and a source book of mythology, what else can or needs to be done? How, more importantly, does the translator achieve an “authentic” connection with the original text, thereby arriving at those meanings elaborated by Artaud, meanings that are outside the purview of literal or referential meaning, thus most difficult to gain access to? There are suggestions throughout “The Shadow” of what Blaser imagined was possible through such a translation. His use of lacunae midline, his absenting of certain seemingly key phrasings and words, his lineal transpositions (as at the end of the poem, resulting in a markedly different last line from Nerval’s)—all show the ways in which Blaser sought to position his translation in an intermediate relation to Nerval’s text. Uninterested in yet another “faithful” rendering, while not dismissive of the importance of such an undertaking, he works in language “en route,” to borrow Paul Celan’s phrasing (49). The resulting translation inevitably comes up against what Walter Benjamin well understood when he wrote in his important essay “The Task of the Translator,” “all translation is only

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a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages” (75). To a degree that remains central to Blaser’s effort to translate Nerval, this foreignness is preserved by Blaser’s assiduously developed understanding of the ways in which his language remains supplemental to and separate from the structural, linguistic, and multireferential aspects of the original: a separate and separated poem. The paradox of Blaser’s formulation of his identity as a poet-translator—that he “become Nerval, and yet remain my own poet” (Audit 48)—serves as the definitional praxis for all his work on Nerval. In contrast to Duncan’s emphasis on the fixity of “essential” meanings, Blaser engages a version of translation that is in between, thereby more fully realizing his stated task of insuring that “the tie of the actual and the other is absolutely real. A reality” (Audit 45). A reality, one might say, of the in-between. V In his letter to Blaser of April 23, 1966, which concludes the Nerval section in Audit, Duncan writes that he had “set my translation of Les Chimères at war with your version. Raising ideas out of the heat of battle” (60). Duncan’s phrasing crucially reveals how this episode represented to him a moment of real conflict: a going to war. Duncan’s language also underscores a major precept of his poetic and personal stance: the sense, developed from his readings of Heraclitus, that in each conflict the seeds of the new order are contained. As he writes in his 1969 essay “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife”: The crucial battle in which we should exterminate the enemy is the battle against what seem to us established ideas of the poet and his art; but no sooner is he exterminated than, disestablished, he must spring anew to fight now, not for his establishment but for his life. The very life of our art is our keeping at work contending forces and convictions. (112)

Both a solidifying and a reestablishing of the context of his art, Duncan’s translations and extensive commentary form an integral part of his process-based creative activity. If the motif of war occurs frequently as a site of intellectual and poetic concern, it also remains for Duncan a healthy and necessary construct on which to build and develop the poetry. That Duncan clearly understood the destructive consequences of his actions on his friendship with Blaser is evident from his April 23 letter. But what remains interesting to observe is the way in which Duncan assiduously

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blurs the mythopoeic, autobiographical, and etymological elements of this episode to provide an extensive reading of his actions, bringing the entire event “into the active area of my published poetics”: It remains that I am troubled by my awareness of how much this war of ideas is experienced by you as an attack upon and injury of yourself as a poet. For, in a sense, eschewing ideas in poetry—not bringing poetics into action as theory, that is—you are unarmed, a would-be neutral citizen of Poetry, innocent victim of my warring aggression to take over the realm of Poetic Ideas under my rule. (60)

Duncan’s troping on the Poundian image of nation-state and ruler, as this image applies to his own authority in the realm of poetics, provides a vital subtext to his attack on Blaser. And it highlights again the way in which, fueled by Blaser’s lack of a more clearly articulated poetics by which he could defend himself against the “aggression,” Duncan felt compelled to draw out the terms of his own recognitions and achievement via an “attack” on Blaser’s work. Duncan goes on to identify the source of his last name, meaning “brown warrior” in Gaelic. Playing out the etymological line still farther, he uses the linkage of their names to diminish Blaser: the “bert” of Robert—which we share, for your name hides in its affectionate diminutive and makes esoteric the root of the name Robert—seems to mean “bright.” . . . as the “Ro—” of Robert means “fame.” The “fame” we certainly share: L. fama report, Doric Greek pháma . . . And in the apocalyptic dream of the H.D. Book, I saw in the blazer, the blazing or glowing figure in the West, you reading your name emblazoned in its pun. You stood over against—with a war in the area between—holding the West, opposite to the Doctor, Charles Olson (my Paracelsus) and myself where we worked in the East to release the sources once more. (60)

The tactic of linguistic erudition, mixed with a fiery spirit of engagement, sets this off as a particularly astringent translation of personal enmity and poetic facility into a portentous sign of dis-affection between the two poets. Like the “bert” that Duncan separates from his name, his aim here seems to be to linger over that which is similar between himself and Blaser, while clearly suggesting a hierarchy of Roberts, with “RD” the ascendant figure here. Built of a complex of associations in which the etymological and mythic sources of their names are fused, Duncan consequentially locates the “blaze” of Blaser in his own dream consciousness as made manifest to him during the writing of the H.D. Book.

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Finally, in another move to assimilate to himself (and thereby take away from Blaser) yet another authorial figure, Duncan pairs himself with Olson opposite (east of ) the acolyte “Robin.” Duncan here attempts to isolate and strip Blaser of his poetic credentials, placing him in a context geographically and poetically opposed to that of Duncan and Olson, who “worked in the East to release the sources.” Significantly, Duncan has the two older poets working together; in contrast, Blaser remains provisionally cut off from this linkage, “with a war in the area between.” It bears noting that Audit was published in the heart of what was then Olson country; Charles Doria, one of the editors of Audit, had been a student of Olson’s at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was part of the coterie of male graduate students who gathered around Olson during these years. Duncan’s need to frame matters as a rivalry over who was better suited to occupy a seat at the Olson table suggests jealousy of Blaser, who since the late 1950s had developed and maintained his own, independent relationship with Olson. It is in this charged space of multiple and sliding meanings and relationships that Duncan positions himself and the entire conflict with Blaser over their translation of Nerval. Blaser’s letters to Duncan from this period remain agonizingly actual in response to the attack set forth by Duncan, and it is clear enough from the exchange that Blaser experienced this episode primarily as a personally wounding act of betrayal conducted behind the screen of aesthetics. In contrast, Duncan saw it as a vital moment of contestatory, possibly mutually challenging, poetics. As he writes in the April 23 letter, It is . . . clear from your two letters of November, from your pain in my criticism and your effort to find agreement with me, that this very polemic which had set me off to raise new ideas in my poetics and to re-relate what Poetry was, after the fact of your Les Chimères as a proposition of Poetry—this often blind contention—was experienced by you as an attack rather than as a challenge. (60–1)

The propositions Duncan sets forth here are exact and exacting. That he understood his role in this discourse (which was also a discord) to be an explicator of “new ideas” and a guardian of Poetry is evident from these and other remarks he makes throughout the commentary and the correspondence with Blaser. Why didn’t Blaser take up the challenge? What circumstances of selfpreservation or personal detachment kept him from responding more

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directly to Duncan’s comments and criticism? One possible answer can be found in “The Fire” and other essays that appeared soon after the Audit issue. Blaser did in fact reply—albeit in a context at some remove from the circumstances of his rift with Duncan. With the publication of “Particles” in 1969 and “The Stadium of the Mirror” in 1974, Blaser began to articulate the terms of his art in precisely the ways that Duncan saw missing from the brief account Blaser had appended to his translations as they first appeared.9 In the context of this episode, Blaser’s later statements on poetry and poetics resonate with the profound shifts signaled here in his work on Nerval. They reflect a concerted move away from the ephebe-like stance that filters through this exchange, toward the increasingly individuated propositions of his own maturing practice and vision. Finally, the impress of these events can be heard in the following lines from Blaser’s poem “Robert Duncan,” written roughly twenty years later: I remember the quarrel over experience—on Greene Street— and still think you spoke too soon of a sacred cut-out it was the process of the actual we were both about what exactly do we experience in poēsis over the neat “I” that thinks itself a unity of things or disunity desperately untrue to whatever we are tied to—like one’s grief or the smothering domestic realism, or the I-feel, so deep and steeply, no one wants to listen without a drumhead postivisms of the self that die into an urn (Holy Forest 317)

The conversation lapses into internal meditation, discontinuous flickers of a “never was” that finds voice again in the bemused recognition of an “I” passing over the language and through it. “The heart in your heart is not your heart only,” Blaser reminds his companion, “it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experience that no one can own” (318).

CHAPTER FOUR

Recovering the Public World: Robin Blaser, Hannah Arendt, and the Discourses of Self and Other in Image-Nations 1–12

Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author of his own life story. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition discoursing that is to say, running around arranging things, ourselves among them centrifugal, after our brief hangup among things working again and again with that operational language always, an incorporeal matter, sharp as sticks and stones —Blaser, “Image-Nation 12 (Actus” In a profound sense, poetry always remains at the beginning, where the body is involved in thought—the passion that a man reaches for the world before he has any sense whatever of an uncreated thing like

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happiness. This involves the “process of image” and the “rhythm of it.” The reading of a poem is the re-enactment of the images of contact with the world. —Blaser, “Particles”

I When Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan had their falling out in late 1965 over ostensibly poetic matters related to their translations of Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet sequence Les Chimères, what became most immediately apparent perhaps were the fundamentally different ways in which they understood the poet’s role in the writing process and the nature of poetic language. Moreover, as a staged battle over the ethics and aesthetics of translation, the quarrel also revealed fundamentally different stances toward the relationship between language and subjectivity. While Duncan preserved in that conversation a rigid belief in language as gnosis and the poet as scribe and auditor of universalist meaning, Blaser’s approach was to view Nerval’s language through the lens of Arendt’s understanding of an ongoing public action, producing meaning through the exchange that occurs when poet and word are translated through the act of speech-making. It’s a critical difference, one that involves two very different versions of subjectivity and agency: Duncan’s privileging the poet’s role in the process of poetic making, arguing for the centrality of the poet’s choices in matters of form and language; Blaser’s keeping to a resolute skepticism about what actually happens when poet and speech are brought together in poiesis, and in so doing suggesting that, as per the epigraph from Arendt at the beginning of this chapter, “nobody is the author” of any given poem. The poems are, for Blaser, just that: given, and their meaning lies not so much in the singularity of any one text as in the web of associations that text images through a language of public recall and politically informed making. The pairing of Blaser and Duncan (one that inevitably involves the third figure of Jack Spicer) of course makes sense on a number of levels, notably their shared roots in the San Francisco Renaissance and lifelong friendship with one another. But reading both the poetry and essays Blaser produced in the wake of this disagreement and after confirms the degree to which, Duncan and Blaser’s similarities in a cosmologically and mythically based poetics notwithstanding, we are in the presence of two very different sensibilities. I have discussed many of these differences at length in the previous chapter, but I want to begin my discussion here of Blaser’s resolutely “public” poetics, his assertion of the intersubjective nature of poetic discourse,

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by underscoring a separation in attitude and stance that goes to the heart of Blaser’s project. For while Duncan’s mythopoetic and vatic approach has remained a predominant force behind Blaser’s cosmology of “great companions,” Blaser’s own increasingly individuated stance and profoundly ethical struggle for the terms of his poetic practice find their fullest expression in his meditation on self and other, on individual and polis, and on the language in which individuals collaborate in the production of public meaning. Taken together, these issues suggest the dense topographical terrain of The Holy Forest, the collection that includes the bulk of Blaser’s work in poetry from 1956 to 2004.1 The comprehensiveness of this effort is made clear in the essays that, together with this volume, form a singular contribution to postwar U.S. and Canadian poetries and to continuing efforts to produce and sustain a genuinely public art. The “forest” of Blaser’s title serves as a metaphor for that uncharted realm—that wilderness—in which “I” and “Other,” Self and World coexist in indeterminate yet palpable relation. “Forests are where one is lost, and sometimes found,” Blaser tells us in “The Stadium of the Mirror,” the essay that accompanies the poems in the first book publication of “Image-Nations 1–12.” This volume decisively sets the stage for Blaser’s later inquiries into the nature of social and public life, the instability and ineffability of language, and the transparencies and fractures of poetic subjectivity. In poetry and prose that argue against the sufficiencies of the Cartesian self, Blaser offers a profound critique of philosophical and poetic models that insist upon notions of a unified subjectivity, of what Wlad Godzich has referred to in his introduction to Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies (1986) as “the conception of the subject as the organizer and sense-maker of lived experience” (viii). In a passage that has vivid implications for Blaser’s work in The Holy Forest, Godzich suggests that the works of contemporary philosophers such as de Certeau and Emmanuel Lévinas pose a direct challenge to post-Enlightenment positionings of the self as arbiter of the “real”: Against a notion of the truth as the instrument of a mastery being exercised by the knower over areas of the unknown as he or she brings them within the fold of the same, Lévinas argues that there is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me, and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and of the same in order to settle in a land under its rule. Here the knower sets out on an adventure of uncertain outcome, and the instruments that he or she brings may well be inappropriate to the tasks that will

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arise. Reason will play a role, but it will be a secondary one; it can only come into play once the primary fact of the irruption of the other has been experienced. (xvi)

It is in this propositional space deeply inflected by the presence of the other (alterity) and otherness that Blaser’s poetry makes manifest a middle-ground of activity and intellection. Here, the individual self as such is neither aggrandized nor dismissed, but its role is shifted away from the private and intimate concerns of individualism (as per Arendt’s privileging of the public self ) toward the world shared in common. This polis, inscribed in the discourses of language spoken by men and women, shifts poetics dramatically away from the solipsism of interior expressivity toward the densely political and moral meeting that occurs only in the space of public activity. As Blaser suggests in his 1974 essay “The Stadium of the Mirror,” he would seek to inscribe in the public space of poetic thought an “effort to recover the primary language in which the world and the sacred are alive” (53). Connecting this recovery to Arendt’s valuation of the interconnectedness of all public thought, we find the following: The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always falls into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. (183–4)

As Blaser himself has suggested on numerous occasions, the model of public and social reality he has worked at consistently over the last forty or so years stems directly from his early exposure to the work of Arendt, who taught a graduate course at Berkeley in 1955 on European political theory. While Blaser wasn’t able to attend this course, Arendt’s presence on campus and the subsequent buzz surrounding her discussions of contemporary Western political and social philosophy had a great impact on Blaser and Spicer and the circles in which they traveled. Blaser has described this early period as one of anticipatory recognition: The excitement on campus gathered in crowds—Thus, the community there could carry by conversation and constant talking what was going on in political philosophy—or, rather, the philosophy of politics—Spicer and I were particularly interested, since our philosophical adventures had led hardly at all to polis/politics.2

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Starting with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), the importance of whose first preface Blaser has acknowledged numerous times over the years, Blaser began to track Arendt’s work, to find corollaries to his own developing sense of a historically and philosophically grounded poetics. As an orientation point to Blaser’s own thinking-through of matters, the last paragraph of Arendt’s 1950 preface remains pivotal: We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain. (ix)

Along with The Human Condition (1958), The Origins of Totalitarianism provides a critical vocabulary for Blaser’s subsequent inquiry into the nature of political experience and cultural knowledge in the twentieth century. It is in The Human Condition, though, that Arendt delineates in particularly cogent ways the public and social realms of human endeavor, providing a definitional backdrop for Blaser’s thinking that is important at least to sketch in here, as her sense of the terms “public” and “social” differs somewhat from common contemporary usage in which they have become all-but-interchangeable.3 According to Arendt, modern formations of the social have their roots in the ancient Roman and Greek distinctions between the “private,” understood as that pertaining to one’s household and personal affairs (including the harvesting of crops, seeking of shelter, and other necessities of existence), and “the public” (or res publica as the Romans termed it), that space of interaction held in common by all (with the notable exception of slaves and women). As Arendt outlines it, only with the collapsing of the private into the social (realms that had seemed antithetical to the ancients) in the mid-to-late eighteenth century do we begin to see the emergence of the social as the dominant governing force within Western European cultures. With the formation of mass society and increased industrialization in the early nineteenth century, the private and public realms are both subsumed into the conformist totality of the social. Arendt’s assessment of the role played by the social from the nineteenth century on is unequivocal and, given her own experience as a survivor of the global fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, not surprising: The rise of mass society . . . only indicates that the various social groups have suffered the same absorption into one society that the family units had

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suffered earlier; with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social had finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual. (41)

As Arendt goes on to suggest, the modern period’s organization of life processes around labor and work, those factors necessary for sustaining life and aspects of experience once relegated to the private realm of individual households, resulted in a situation where “society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (Human 46). If Arendt reserves a good deal of hostility for the conformist and survivalist aspects of the social, she does so in light of what she views as the erasure of the public realm’s ancient role as that space in which excellence (arete as the Greeks called it, virtus in the Roman distinction) could be made evident before all members of the polis: While we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public, our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private . . . No activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a space for its exercise. Neither education nor ingenuity nor talent can replace the constituent elements of the public realm, which is the proper place for human excellence. (Human 49)

The loss, in Arendt’s view, has been all but total and has resulted in a “banishment” of that world-in-common wherein the individual could understand both his own difference and singularity as constitutive modes of being, of relation, rather than, as in the sense pervasive to contemporary Western society, homogenization, indistinctiveness, isolation. The public, in Arendt’s account, is the made place of the world, fabricated in common by human activities engaged to a commonly understood end. Both a realm of conjoint meaning and carefully disposed alterity, the public account provided by Arendt gives a central beam for Blaser’s poetics of intersubjective imagism: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world,

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like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” (52). As contemporary theory has argued, there are a number of problems in such a formulation of social reality, in particular the notion of a “world in common”—especially as that world is currently more likely to be fractured and unevenly shared, with certain groups and sectors of the political and social realms possessing more power than others, while many factions and individuals are marginalized or left out of the picture entirely. Yet, it’s important at the same time to recognize that Arendt’s conception of the public world is very much part of a historical ethos in which, as she writes in her preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize the masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives” (vii). For Arendt, and to a certain degree for Blaser as well, the public realm holds out the only sustaining hope for the survival of civil discourse and the preservation of cultural knowledge. Despite what nearly seventy years of further erosion of Western political and intellectual life have taught us, Arendt’s vision of the public realm is no idealized or nostalgic construction; rather, it remains the gathering point that “prevents our falling over each other” (52), while preserving a space for discourse, for publicly informed and culturally locatable identities to engage one another. For Blaser, these distinctions vitally inform the commentary of his essays. As is clear, Arendt’s propositions go directly to the heart of his formulation of a poetics of public feeling and political concern. At stake is a version of public life that is intimately related to the tangible realities of poetry and the potential for a common (i.e., public) language of political investment. As Blaser suggests in his 1969 essay “Particles”: Poetry has moved since early in the century to the inclusion of political content, not because the relevance of poetry can be defined by its political or ideological content, but because the public world is sick and has in many places disappeared for lack of particularity. Nothing is shared and no vision of a shared world is possible. (36)

Blaser’s linking of politics and political projections of social reality with the language arts extends upon Arendt’s conception of the public as that site in which discourse among individuals may occur. And it is here, Blaser argues, that twentieth-century poetry has most meaningfully engaged the public arena of its concern, by providing a space for the reader to renew contact with his/her worldly self: “What has to be understood is that form

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and content combine in an activity which reveals meaning, grasps the mind of the reader, so that he is forever changed, because, if he has understood, there has been a meeting. And that meeting has permanence since it is held in public words” (37). It is this meeting that marks the poem as a public, as opposed to solely private, occasion. “We return again and again to the importance of language in its activity of holding on to the world and life in that world” (40). Returning to the earlier quotation from Arendt, poetry serves as public acknowledgment of that web of relations that defines human affairs. Hardly nostalgic gestures of a political naïf, Blaser’s comments resonate with the principled valuations of testimony and public projection, based upon a measured understanding of the ways in which the discourses of poetry and poetics must go hand-in-hand with a recognition in a cultural environment often hostile to the undertaking. Thus, his worldview is tempered by recognitions of the technocratic and ideologically impervious aspects of commerce and global consumerism that stand in opposition to (or, more accurately, surround and attempt to nullify) the possibility of genuinely public acts of knowledge. These recognitions find renewed articulation in one of Blaser’s more recent essays “Recovery of the Public World” (1993), in which he attaches Arendt’s forceful commentary to a project meant to engage the durability of the world. We can hardly understand it, even though it has only changed technologically. Where the durability of the world is our primary concern, we uncover, alongside the discourses of the social and the political, the related—or should-be related—discourse of the arts and of the sacred. But durability has become unattractive with built-in obsolescence, and our culture sets the latter discourses aside, unless they can become an exchange value. What was the durable in-between of the world is now an abstraction, or a series of them, drawn from the characteristics of large numbers of people. (30)

Rather than setting the discourses of the arts and the sacred apart from the manifold processes of society-at-large and maneuvering these discourses toward a space of privilege and sacrosanct regard, Blaser links them to what he calls “our worldly project in language” (“Recovery” 31) and suggests that only once we begin to revivify the lost connectives of our cultural past can we claim to have presented ourselves to the world—and to each other. “We need to know how old we are,” Blaser writes, a comment that simultaneously suggests the effort must be multidisciplinary and educational—a working back to understand how and where we have come (37).

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Blaser’s long-standing commitment to a poetics of public statement and world thought has been emphasized by a number of poets and critics. Among the more recent is Miriam Nichols, who lays the groundwork for Blaser’s theorizing of the poetic and public in her article “Three for Public: Steve McCaffery, Nicole Brossard, and Robin Blaser.” In this essay, Nichols argues for a reappraisal of Blaser’s recognition of the ways in which the public, political, and poetic are inflected by the numinous, cosmological, and nonvisible that form a corollary world of (other) meaning. In the work, such recognition manifests itself in Blaser’s avowedly utopian impulse to go beyond language and its deictic functions, to move in a poetic discourse and landscape in which the visible objects of the world are imaged by what is absent, rather than what is named. As Nichols suggests: The element in the poem which communicates nothing and takes place nowhere reinvests the visibles of the moment with the potential to be otherwise—in opposition to a cultural economy which forecloses the possibility of being otherwise than represented. Poetic utopoi thus imply that knowledge is an activity rather than the condition of knowing something—and hence their difference, when it appears, is irreducible to more of the same (not for sale). Poetry is not only about the expression of different forms of subjectivity or different public behaviors, different linguistic formations or different historical thought worlds, but also and always a continuing reclamation and renewal of the means of producing thought. (99; Emphasis added)

“An activity rather than the condition of knowing something,” Blaser’s poems gesture toward “utopoi” that are situated on the horizon of public reception and thought. As co-participants in this production of meaning and thought, we enter Blaser’s poems painfully aware that whatever pattern we may discern in the movements of the language, it is a changeable and multiple fashioned one—subject to sudden alterations and variable degrees of silence. And this impulse toward “visibles of the moment” corresponds in certain ways to Arendt’s understanding of the “revelatory quality of speech,” which, as she argues, “comes to the fore where are with others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness” (Human 180). This activity, this decisive action in the public world of human discourse, has unknown, unforetold consequences, which is why for Blaser at the heart of each poetic act there is the twin awareness of terror and faith, fear and gratitude, in the act of disclosure the poem represents. Arendt again: “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure” (ibid.). The event of language requires, then, a confidence in the asperity of the poetic task, one

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that involves the subject in a risky translation of intention and desire into the imaged speech of human activity: “Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm” (ibid.). Rather than fetishizing the poem’s difficulty and valorizing (in a more Poundian move) the cultural knowledge base from which the poem emerges, a knowledge base inevitably inflected with images of mastery and authorial control, Blaser refutes the exclusionary impulse, insisting instead upon the genuine, urgently felt difficulty of the undertaking. As he suggests about the writing of the early Image-Nation poems, it is a difficulty underwritten by the investigative nature of the poems’ activity: It is my purpose to make it difficult for the first Image-Nations . . . I wish in this way to suggest what it is that haunted their composition. I could have wound up there inside the lyric logic of the disappearance—of myself, a syntax, the whole damn cultural grid. While then the image would have remained the possibility of an entrance, magically, still the danger was that the I, the poet and the manhood of the poems in the distance of the work would become only a spectator. (“Stadium” 55)

Situating the first twelve of the Image-Nations at a point at which they are most defenseless to charges of obscurity and inward referentiality (a misreading of the fully public nature of these works, I would argue), Blaser begins here to articulate and define the project that has occupied his attentions and energies to the present day: to reclaim for poetry a position of public assertion and accountability. If the loss of the lyric, ego-based “I” is part of the cost of this endeavor, Blaser would seem to suggest that continuing efforts to preserve this I result in a flawed epistemology that has even graver consequences for the continuing cultural life of poetry—and the public world it represents. “No serious poetry can be described as self-expression,” Blaser writes in “Particles” (38). In saying this, Blaser clearly doesn’t intend a dispensing with the personal; rather, he wants to suggest that no valid contemporary poetic discourse can emanate from a space configured only in terms of its relation to the poet’s individuated life experience. Again, the critical move here is away from the singularity of the poetic subject toward the public subject made visible in human speech. The I is significant only insofar as it exists as one part of the poetic encounter—a meeting that is always involved in “activities of content—of passion and thought—the relation of a man to the world as the world calls to him” (“Particles” 38). If the I retains expressive

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force at all, it is as a gathering point, a dictational site of words and worlds that inform the poem’s development: I know nothing of form that is my own doing all out of one’s self our words were the form we entered, turning intelligible and strange at the point of a pencil (Holy Forest 124)

Language in this undertaking is neither limit nor ultimate presence; rather, it is the folded, perceptible form of a public and intimately known actuality. The imaged I of this work exists neither in isolation from what it expresses nor in mimetic relation to the experience rendered in the poem’s language. Instead, subjectivity remains “both visible and invisibly continuous. At an edge. At the edge of his thought and feeling” (“Stadium” 55). Blaser’s major contribution to poetic thought and practice may rest on this persuasive aspect alone: his rigorous rethinking of the entire set of relations that includes writer, text, reader and the discourses that link them to each other. In suggesting the terms of a meeting, a correspondence, bound to an activity of thought, Blaser establishes a poetics that is intermedial and, in the best sense of the term, oppositional. The radical potential of this endeavor lies in its recognition of the public value and immediacy of a contemporary poetics that refuses to collapse under the weight of cultural and social conditions that call for nostalgic and otherwise false epistemologies of experience. Like Pound and Olson after him, two of the “masters” most often cited by Blaser in his naming of the tradition, Blaser’s is a critical art of reappraisal and cultural repositioning; more clearly from our present vantage point, his work proposes an ethics at the center of a poetics—one that would investigate the terms by which any of us writes poetry in a posthumanist ethos of global capital and cultural forgetting: this thought of the end of the end is the modern sweetness and terror, but it simplifies to terror alone—the societal dream of itself as absolute reality, then practiced as uniformity and barbarism, is the oily turntable of the round-house where we repair the engine again and again—it is the absolute humanism that is repulsive (Holy Forest 188)4

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The purpose, for Blaser, as for anyone interested in the revivification of public (which is to say, poetic) discourse, “is toward a reopening of words— towards the violence and dynamism of Language” (“Stadium” 58). What emerges from the poems, as I want to trace out in the remainder of this chapter, is a version of subjectivity and poetic practice that relies far less on narratives of personal statement (the solipsistic veracities of the self-expressive biography) than on the activities of “communally” achieved knowledge. The poems, in their processural exploration of the overlapping realms of self and other, body and spirit, world and text, are the recognizably principled accounts of this endeavor.5 They adhere to the recognition that, as Blaser frames matters in “Image-Nation 18 (an apple”: “universe is part of ourselves” (Holy Forest 214). II It is in Image-Nations 1–12, the composition of which spans a period from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, that Blaser begins to explore the ways in which poetry may reflect a world and selves within that world. As the first “Image-Nation,” titled “the fold,” makes clear, the series will be as much “about” its own procedures as about the properties of language and the subjective I: the participation is broken fished from a sky of fire the fiery lake pouring itself to reach here that matter of language caught in the fact so that we meet in paradise in such times, the I consumes itself (Holy Forest 61)

As Arendt might suggest, the poem is both a beginning into speech and its necessary accompaniment of actions already in progress, actions that predate the subject of the poem and the language that enfolds its expression. Here, as elsewhere in Blaser’s work, the I that consumes itself in the grandeur of its own radiant expectancy is painfully at odds with the poem’s effort to define a space of speaking, an intermedial locale of initial encounter. The poem’s difficulty, as Blaser suggests in “The Stadium of the Mirror,” stems precisely from this rift between the public artifice of the poem and the interiority of a speaker seeking expression in the discourses

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of human speech. As the poem makes evident, this is a locale of intensely imaged particulars, a “paradise” of exodic conceit in which the I is both observer and observed: white trees, rings around them, wander and roll, the fog breaks, the sky, blue in the window sits up there, out of reach hands full of beautifuls-uglies justs-unjusts halves-doubles, pulls the strings . . . (Holy Forest 61)

Causality and the perceptible realm of the natural world are made part of a discourse on the elements of a world that is both outside the poem and encloses it within an image of “white trees, rings around them.” It is a world familiar to us from the writings of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, where we find this description of the incorporeal and invisible that chiasmically meet the corporeal and visible, “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” (139). Later, in “Image-Nation 5 (erasure,” Blaser works further at this model of composition and agency that, as he notes in “Stadium of the Mirror,” were already “negligent, uneasy, inarticulate” (55). In so doing, he sets out in fractured lines of nearly obliterated connectives the rough outlines of an argument: the words do not end but come back from the adventure the body is at the edge of their commotion the nonsense the marvelous clarity in the pool of the heart (Holy Forest 113)

The poem, in its left/right configuration, poses a dialogue between language and the physically bounded realm (“the body at the edge”) of thought and feeling. In these “traces,” the position of a self is at stake, as are the

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incarnational properties of language: we quarrel over the immortal Word, many times one falls out of the mortal there suddenly the missing outward journey (Holy Forest 113)

The “quarrel” here echoes back to that between Duncan and Blaser over their translations of Nerval, and suggests again the far less programmatic approach to poetics Blaser assumes in his writing. The lines fold one into the next in a blurring of the binary of subject/object, as the spiritual factness of the “Word as Flesh” forms a kind of seam, interleaving the mortal and immortal in language compressed almost to the point of inarticulacy: this co-herence falls, like rain, into the syllables this in-herence of a golden poem translating blood, dancers, and whirling drunken lives into a tense music of a hollyhock (Holy Forest 115)

Here the related discourses of Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jalal ud-Din Rumi, each of which has been intricately interwoven throughout the poem’s meditation on the visible/invisible, real/unreal, come forward in a language of heightened lyricism and tensed subjectivity. The encounter is made in language, yet, as Blaser’s poem records, its experience is one that cannot be limited to language alone—nor can the experience the poem communicates be said to belong to that of the poet alone. It is, if anything, an anti-personal poetics we find here, one enmeshed in the patterns of worldimage that enter the poet’s consciousness, not as facts of firstness or original feeling, but as traces of a visible world. Blaser’s question—“What exactly do we experience in poeisis” (317)—is given added force in the context of a refusal to sentimentalize or aestheticize

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the first-person singular, which, as Blaser reminds us, is “neither first, nor a person, nor singular” (318). His comment is meant as a playful yet deeply serious rebuke of philosophical and poetic discourses that would attempt to resolve the matter through the simplifying dicta of egocentricism. As he has suggested in his 1989 essay “Poetry and Positivisms: High Muck-A-Muck or ‘Spiritual Ketchup’ ”: We have . . . in the twentieth century poetry that is unable and unwilling to depend upon the direct and simplifying clarity of the ego at the centre, a concern with the arrangement of words which both renews and disturbs our relation to words and to the rhythm of form—so to compose the representable alongside the nonrepresentable. (25)

Blaser’s critique of the ego-based lyric (a critique that finds echoes in Yeats and Pound and particular resonance in the work of Olson) reinforces the intermediate position, in which a useful interrogation of concept, meaning, and perspective may occur. No one position (or stance, to borrow from Olson) can be claimed as complete, as the poet confronts the realities of poem and language, realities formed of the discourses of sexuality, spirituality, philosophy, and religion. It is a flowing-out and through, a disappearance, rather than an emplacement or a presence, that we encounter in Blaser’s tactile poetry: a Nervalian movement of astonishment an arm around a hollyhock or foxglove, as if we dressed in them, a flowered man the bees disturb the stillness seeking sweetness in the pockets an art as natural as lunch poems or an extravagant speaking out of the gnostic horse’s mouth a translation of oneself into the Other (Holy Forest 113–14; emphasis in the original)

This “translation” is one that, as Blaser repeatedly suggests, can never be completed; rather, the fluctual nature of the poem’s movement records the drifting back and forth across the divides of self and other. The poet’s job

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becomes that of repeatedly renegotiating this translational “edge” out of which the form of the poem and it language arise: the task of a man and his words is at the edge where we are translated restless men the quarrel over the immortal language, one may believe in a god-language behind us, but god moves to the end of our sentences where words foment a largeness of visible and invisible worlds they are a commotion of one form (Holy Forest 116)

What is at stake here for these “translated restless men” are the necessities of action that will find resonance in the public space of human discourse. For Blaser, the translation he refers to is certainly gendered—“task of a man,” “restless men,” and so on—in the way that Arendt’s discourses arise out of a similar concern for the subjects, coded male, of political discourse. In a careful emplacement of gendered pronouns, however, Blaser’s poem reveals as well a space for the un-gendered, that Beloved who “is the murmur / inside the work / at the edge / of the words” (117). Perched between the demands of a language of “translated restless men” and the spiritual pitch of the poet’s call for the “Cup-Bearer” who will redress the “holes in my breast,” the poem erases as well distinctions between “who is speaking” and who is listening, who is other and who is one (Holy Forest aa117–18). Not without subject, not without a narrative that doesn’t entirely elide gender, Blaser’s poem is situated in the in-between space of language and subjectivity, which are, as he reminds us, the only ties to the real worth registering in a love meant to “gain your attention / at the edge of this / movement” (Holy Forest 115). In this “one form” that the poem gestures toward (a unificatory construct that echoes Duncan’s notion of the poem as “living force”), language is the contact point, but not, as Blaser is quick to point out, the source. Here it is useful to keep in mind a discussion from his 1968

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essay “The Fire”: I am trying to describe the foreignness, the outsideness, as a kind of metaphor for the sense I have of the process that leads to a poem, which again is outside, when made, and it is akin to translation, a words which in its parts hold the meaning of the word metaphor, the bringing over . . . The heat I’m after is not simply the personal heat of the meeting, the recognition, but a heat and a passion which are of the nature of existence itself. The personal, yes, but then the translation of the personal to correspond with larger and larger elements, images of earth, is a process of inclusion—a growth of sensibility, in Valéry’s phrase, but also a making which is not self-expressive. (Allen, Poetics 243–4)

In Blaser’s conception of it, the discourses of self are inextricably bound to discourses of worldliness—political, social, religious, mystical—that provide a context, an outside, that the poem’s language continually negotiates, passes through, and back again. As Blaser has aphoristically framed the matter: “The seat of the language in the Other is the necessary exploration” (“Stadium” 62). By which I take him to mean that only through a genuinely dialogic poetic practice, one not seeking the self-affirming closures of a transcendent or idealized subjectivity, can poetry begin to suggest the repleteness and incommensurability of worldly experience. That is to say, the ethics of this work are manifest in their practice. III “Difficult voices speak to us,” Blaser writes in “The Stadium of the Mirror” (60). Blaser’s voice remains one of the most difficult of our time, largely due to his concerted attempt to work out the problematic nature of all discourse (written, spoken, lived) and its historically pinioned, culturally determined character. Shaking free of the dissolutions and ideological fictions of the contemporary social condition is, as Blaser’s writing career attests, no easy trick. One risks, among other things, not being read or being read incorrectly (a situation addressed with particular bitterness in the correspondence between Duncan and Blaser during the course of their Nerval dispute); seeming out of step with the cultural, social, and artistic zeitgeist; or simply being dismissed out-of-hand for “obscurity, crazyness, and personalism” (58). Yet, as Blaser notes, the consequences of failing to follow through on what is essentially a retracing (however partial and incomplete it must remain) of the maps of our shared cultural reality are severe and

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persistent: The forgetfulness of our cultural condition destroys our ability to think. Since the meaning of the term [humanitas] has become questionable in one discourse after another—indeed, murdered by way of some of them—I think our sense of our humanity is central to whatever we may believe. We began, I’m told, in conversation with God; we’ve come to converse, if we converse at all, only with ourselves. (“Recovery” 24)

Caught in this discourse of forgetfulness that is our contemporary situation, Blaser’s poetry seeks to reestablish the links, to artifice a poetry of public accountability and interpersonal delight in “the depths beneath the surfaces in which each ‘simple, separate person’ swims” (“Hello” 87). Key to this process of reestablishing the poems’ worldliness in a cultural and political climate of reactionary claims and indolent lyricism is Blaser’s attentiveness to image: both as figure and as objective, perceivable fact. “Unless the Image-Nations are read by image, there is no saving grace,” Blaser asserts in the opening sentence of “Stadium of the Mirror” (53). This insistence upon image is clear enough from the title of the series itself, for Image-Nation proposes the public discourses of both image and nation. The nation as image, the image as nation, and both as correspondent realities of imagination. From these “small lighted words,” Blaser points to the public properties of a work devoted to the particularity of images as these occur in the writing itself. The importance for Blaser of the individual image as it relates to his concern for the communal and public is perhaps best summed up in this passage from “Particles”: Greek and Roman political experience argues that to act intelligently in the public realm requires a vision of things. The words themselves, vision and things, are telling. Vision, full of that sense of seeing and image, which are basic to knowing—and things—even bits and pieces. There is no vision of things without the emotions of particularity. (36; Emphasis added)

As Blaser suggests, no meaningful politics can emerge without an accompanying vision of the world and of the objects that compose a world. In this, Blaser again aligns himself with Arendt, whose notion of the seen as that which is made public carries over into Blaser’s formulation of a poetics of “image-nation.” “Everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity,” Arendt writes in The Human Condition. “For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality” (50). One must

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see to become part of the larger, publicly recognizable orders of existence, and seeing requires a receptivity to the images of the world. “How particular the image is,” Blaser writes. “This too is part of the activity of discourse” (“Particles” 37). And, as Arendt suggests, making the particularity of the image evident in the discourses of public men and women remains essential to the trans-generational preservation of community: Only the existence of a public realms and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. (55)

Both the site of a meeting and the instant of an interchange, the image lodges the poetic work in an assiduously contextual and public space. It becomes, as it were, that object held in common by all men and women. As such, it renders the “particular” reviewable as a matter held in-common, allowing meanings to occur in the intensely communal setting of Blaser’s serially constructed poem-works. If polis is dependent upon a vision of things, then the poem is equally dependent upon the image as a site of reciprocity and discourse. This notion finds a powerful analog in Arendt’s depiction of the place of discourse in ancient Greek culture: For the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse. They held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis. In discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it, were made manifest . . . For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. (24; Emphasis in the original)

Grounded in such “talk,” Blaser’s Image-Nations reappropriate the communal sphere as the metaphorical site of the poems’ “interchange.” Rendering the singular a key component of the public and pluralist interchange of the poem’s effort, Blaser would have us recognize that we only begin to recognize the terms of our humanness (humanitas) when we achieve perception of the particular in discourse with others. The image, then, exists for Blaser not merely as a trope of modernist writing, but as the foundational impression, the site of both linkage and separation, wherein the public world is articulated and envisioned. Because it cannot be “completed” as such—it is complete already—the image resists

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hegemonic narratives of totality and closural meaning. Part of a world of publicly actualized poetic discourse, the image reveals itself as part of a discretionary movement among shifting points of contact: the powers are brought to birth and again the vocabulary loses them image—imageless Plotinus says our effort is to make the visible invisible but here the invisible would not be borrowed may you have a radiant world compelling adoration the tree waits to be visible (Holy Forest 119; emphasis in the original)

Like the tree awaiting visibility and concretion as a part of experience, the poem and its language suggest a pool of visible and invisible relations; the mind cannot entirely grasp their meaning, yet the context of an activity that can neither be denied nor entirely articulated has been suggested by the poem’s fluctual play in language. It is in this shifting movement between the visible and the invisible, the image and the imageless, that Blaser meaningfully draws out the terms of the poem’s public statement. At once numinous and material, the poem talk to us through the web of associations and affiliations and disaffiliations each of us experiences as members of a public world. The refusal of a certain kind of interiority, a certain kind of lyric statement, one that turns its back on the necessary relation between poet and world, reminds us how far Blaser would have us travel with him to meet the demands of this post-humanist praxis. Blaser’s emphasis on the particular, the discrete detail, likewise suggests an awareness of those distilled aspects of perception that, taken together, inform the composition and unfolding realities of poetic content. Meaning occurs in the synesthesic moment when image “recommences” in perception. Blaser’s “imaging” of thought (“the words are meaningless /until they emerge in the action they are/images of” (168) is a direct consequence of his rigorous effort to bind the poems to real activity and a keenly process-based understanding of poetic endeavor. The poems are, in this way, effortful, procedurally self-conscious of their instigatory and developmental movement. Unraveling, unfurling, keeping pace with the objects that come into view [“a bone, a ball, a top / an apple, a mirror, a skein of wool” (Holy Forest 126)] they entice and incite with the prospect of newly found observation and knowledge of the world.

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Divestment and initiation accordingly become signature motifs of the work. As Blaser writes in his 1975 essay “The Practice of Outside” on fellowpoet and Berkeley companion Jack Spicer, “The condition of that beginning again in language and meaning is between our manhood, the anthropology of our thought, and everything outside its orders. It is, at times, almost a divestment of the memory of words. Undressed words” (Spicer, Collected Books 285; emphasis in the original). Image-Nations similarly adheres to a poetics of divestment, in which the poems resist completion and the ordering narratives of normative syntax, so that they may engage an “image of an action” wherein reader and writer are invested in the conjoint project of poetic thought: but there, it was there ‘you’ saw the head of a horse burn, its red eye flame ‘you’ stepped to the fireplace where the meta morphosed log lay without a body and put ‘your’ hand over the seeing turned by that privacy from such public perils as words are, we travel in company with the messenger (Holy Forest 62)

“Nourished by Sodom apples” (ibid.), the poet registers the links between the “you,” who is ostensibly the other of the poem’s address, and the public “we,” who travels “in company of the messenger.” If the “we” includes the “you,” it can also be said that both are “turned by that privacy / from such public perils as words.” This arc from the pluralized “I” to the “you” is a critical marker of Blaser’s public positioning of his text. For, as he suggests, in the correspondent acts of seeing, of in-sight, the “you” and the “I” are transformed into the plurality of a “we” brought into existence through the imaged perceptions of a publicly held language. Thereby the standard questions posed of lyric—Who is speaking? Who is listening?—achieve via Blaser’s poetic stance distinctive variation: What are the circumstances in which “I” speak and “you” listen? What is the nature of the relation formed there? Piece by piece, image by image, the work seeks, in its negotiation of the multiplicity of realities and forms governing any single act of perception, not so much a coherence of utterance as an engagement in the processes that allow any of us to “speak” or “act,” alone or in company.

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IV Olson said, “I’d trust you anywhere with image, but you’ve got no syntax” (1958) —Blaser, “Diary, April 11, 1981”

The context of Olson’s comment to Blaser and Blaser’s response, scribbled on the back of a postcard—“Who’s the image boy round here?”—are now part of the public record.6 What is remarkable in the context of Blaser’s development over the next several years was the use he made of what just as well could have become a throwaway comment. Blaser’s receptivity to the challenge of Olson’s remark, his working it over and over again, so that syntax becomes as much a subject as image in the work, is documented in “Stadium of the Mirror,” where Blaser meditates on the absent syntax of the early “Image-Nations”: “The first tentative effort was to remove that syntax which had been a misapprehension—in order to let the image speak out of the absence the Other had become” (54). Syntax here is literally the grammar governing all speech acts, the elements of language that make any of us comprehensible to anyone else. Blaser’s struggle for a syntax, identified by Olson in his comment, suggests a rethinking of the entire relation between subject and object, agency and action, without which sentences cannot work. Risking, then, incomprehensibility at the public level of the sentence becomes a perceptible first step toward understanding the cosmological realities of poetic discourse, realities that when thwarted or ignored slide into the false propositions of a transcendent subjectivity. “The absence of syntax,” Blaser writes, “becomes polar to another language—of presences alongside absences, of speech alongside a silence of words, of a visibility tensed alongside a love which traces its invisible open-work” (“Stadium” 56–7). Blaser’s language here is abstract in knowing ways, seeking to grapple with connections that precede and predate our entry into language. The obliquity of his rhetoric necessitates a corresponding clarity, as Blaser moves to reconsider the materialism of a language poised, tense, at the edge of our experience of the world: “if that language goes / whose power drank from the body, gave / the body, gave amor a skin” (Holy Forest 63). The tie to the real, imaged here in a body whose skin we can and can’t touch, an “amor” both real and fictive, recalls us to a site split between the gaps and erasures of language and the presences of figures who hover over the “immortal word” passed back and forth among men and women who dwell “in company with the messenger.”

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Blaser’s terminology reinforces the investigatory positioning of the work, its attempt to “relearn” its own procedures and arrive differently at a place open to contact with a world positioned between appearance and disappearance, absence and presence. In refusing the confines and conjectures of a culturally inherited syntax—and it is a refusal writ large in the work— Blaser turns to the series as the constitutive formal markers of his processes in poetic practice. While seriality doesn’t replace syntax in Image-Nations, it clearly fulfills the function normally reserved for syntax, that is, that of ordering and regulating the flow of parts of speech into intelligible units of expression. Blaser’s need to understand the composite exigencies of culturally given syntax before grounding his poetic texts in its legitimizing and controlling discourses results in a discernible disjunct in the earlier work. Enfolding discrete observation and detail in the poem’s frictive movements, Blaser enlists serial form as a method (i.e., a practice of both outside and inside) to inquire into “the violence and dynamism of Language” (“Stadium” 58). It is an approach that, as Blaser recognizes, has its costs: “The serial field is honest, if dangerous ground . . . [that] constantly circumscribes an absence that brings its presences to life. An indefiniteness that is one of the providing aspects of the world” (61). If The Holy Forest is the book of that “story of persons, events, activities, images, which tell the tale of the spirit,” then the poetics that inform ImageNations reveal the individual panels of a continuously evolving work. Each is positioned to face the other; there is no single image or single nation at stake in the unfolding narrative. Rather, connections are made, lost, and remade throughout the series, the full meaning of which cannot be ascertained from the reading or writing of any single poem. As Blaser suggests in “The Fire”: “the beauty of the idea that you can write a single poem is a lie” (Allen, 236). As with Spicer’s After Lorca, which provides a model of serial composition that deeply informs Blaser’s own project, the poems move notationally in the ordering of the series and the book. In so doing, seriality remains far more than simply a formal principle of ordering. Rather, it suggests work invested in the discovery and recovery generated by the form and by one’s attention to what is happening. In Blaser’s account, the serial poem: has to be a renewed language and information that becomes a kind of map. Ideally, Jack worked in that long form without looking back and without thought of the previous poem, so that the poet could be led by what was composing. The serial poem is often like a series of rooms where the lights go on and off. It is also a sequence of energies which burn out, and it may, by the path it takes, include the constellated . . . A “necessary world” is composed in the serial poem. (Spicer, Collected Books 278; emphasis added)

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Necessary because, again, it insists upon the public context of poetic making. And upon the reality of the images that compose the poem. Like Spicer’s lemon—“The lemon [should] be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste” (33)—the images that come into the serial poem are entirely real and entirely invented, a paradox that Blaser’s work continually displays. “Things do not connect; they correspond,” Spicer says later in the same “imaginary” letter to Lorca. Similarly, the serial poem continually suggests correspondences and clusters of meaning that accumulate and overlap over time. The work thus engages, as Blaser puts it, “a reopened language [that] lets the unknown, the Other, the outside in again as a voice in the language” (276). Put another way, seriality is where we find subjectivity most fully expressed in the poems. The insular, isolate lyric “I” has given way to the far more public serialized subject, who moves through this work, “burned by a night / light, traveling in company with the messenger” (Holy Forest 90). It is in this emphasis on the unknown, the cosmologically and linguistically Other, that Blaser’s “Image-Nation” series proposes an endeavor of public making, a process in which the activity of thought is imaged in the fragments of discursive writing. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued in her essay “The Blazes of Poetry,” “The interest in making a serial poem is in establishing what kinds of links can be presented between any two units, and among all units. How each is modified in relation to the existence of others. Thus it is an image of sociality (community)” that emerges from the “sutured” bits of language (8–9). Image-Nations develops from this intense awareness of the circumstances of the series as a compositional and ethical practice invested in the collective, the gathered-together, and the communal. Its work traverses a space of the multivoiced rather than the “voice,” of the polyvalent rather the singular, of the random rather than the predetermined. The serial poem, in this sense, proposes in its very intricacy and collective nature a vision of the common world as we find it in Arendt, a vision tied to natality and the implicit boundaries of any single, human life: The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our life span into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us. (55)

Because of its contiguity, its incompleteness (the series ends with the death of the author), its self-modifying form that suggests the backward- and

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forward-looking nature of the work, the serial poem recognizes its own temporality and (in)finiteness, as it proposes a world that we can, quite literally, hold in common with one another, as readers caught in the spell of meaningmaking that the poem enacts. Moreover, as “Image-Nation 5 (erasure” suggests, the historically contingent and culturally specific work in the series as yet another marker of the particular, the discrete detail, out of which meaning is made. These perceptible instances of public recognition become like small poems read from vast stages the images of the war in Vietnam burn up out of the words, where they are not added to the real but compose it where the body burns in bubbles of fat and re opens into something without lineaments (Holy Forest 114)

Read as one part of those “small poems,” the image of a burning body is exacting and horrific in its allusion to a signal episode in the history of postcolonial warfare: the United States’ napalming of North Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War, images of which were seen on the nightly news broadcasts and in the print journalism of the period. As a response to an actual historical incident in extremis, the poem’s language records the terror of the event, while suggesting an attendant dis-ease, as the imaged body gesturally transforms “into something / without lineaments,” that is to say, into a form without trace or outline. The dissolution of the physical combined with the stark appearance of burning flesh compose a space that is at once unreal and palpably horrific. As suggested by the language of this poem, Blaser’s is an unsettling version of human eventuality, one always at the edge of depiction and cognitive understanding. The path through the forest remains, like the language of the poetic series, discontinuous, manifest, hidden, and potentially terrifying. While it would be over-simplifying matters to draw direct parallels between the political-historical events of the period and Blaser’s writing of

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this or any of the other poems in The Holy Forest, the question that arises is this: To what extent does the serial form, as engaged by Blaser, Duncan, Spicer, and others, anticipate and in certain ways relate to the events of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights, antiwar and other mass protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s? As DuPlessis observes, “One ‘answer’ seems to be the articulation of the many and the one. Both [George] Oppen’s and Blaser’s serial works (and Duncan’s too) are marked by the Vietnam War and the post-war crisis of recognition of the wounds to democratic culture carried out in the name of the American imperium” (“Blazes” 7). Certainly, in ways that “Image-Nation 5” makes explicit, the poem is one part of a critical response in the public language of poetry to events that exert great pressure on the poem and its formal procedures.7 Seriality may compose a necessary world, but the world met in the serial work will inevitably suggest the problematic and discontinuous nature of the human historical present in which the poem is written. Governed by this view is Blaser’s acute sense of what lies at stake in any contemporary discourse in which poetry plays a singularly pertinent part. From “The Fire”: That we have reached a point now where such discourse must include the nation, our politics, the scholarship in which we tend to lay down images of poetic thought—is obvious. This is a kind of memory theatre in which the poet with his craft is after not some thing or place remembered, but present. Nothing would be more painful or costly to the mind, and ugly in a sense that great poetry may be very ugly, than a poetry in which the present war was present, held in sight and sound and intellect. (Allen, Poetics 246)

The move is at once toward a credible place of public response and authentic feeling and away from a poetics and poetry that would remove itself from present circumstance, whether political, social, or interpersonal. To do so, as Blaser suggests in “Image-Nation 9 (half and half,” is to invite the situation in which but public life has fallen asleep like a secret name the wrong-reader will say he has pity for others where the thought is born in hatred of pity, which is only feeling the action we are only images of hates pity and its reduction of horror to sentiment (Holy Forest 126; emphasis in the original)

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This perception of public life as having “fallen asleep” exists as a generating concern and intellectual topos throughout the early (and late) Image-Nation poems. Again, Blaser sets the model of sentimentality (or false feeling) against the politically and culturally thought-out purposeful action, imaged in a language of public statement. The implication that each of us is a part of unfolding narratives of social and political life and that the choices we make in these areas form paradigmatic concerns of our moral being is foregrounded by the investigatory traces of the series. In the language of Blaser’s poem, “The words are meaningless until they emerge in the action they are / images of” (Holy Forest 126). Governed by such images, by what can be ascertained in the pictures drawn by language, Image-Nations 1–12 hold forth the possibility of a genuinely dialogic poetics. The poem becomes, in Blaser’s sense of it, “a translation of oneself into the Other” (Holy Forest 114). As he suggests, it is in the process of encountering images in language that we inhabit a transpersonal site of knowledge in which the distinctions of “I” and “Other” achieve particularity and clarity. Recovering a location that is “perched among words,” writer and reader are positioned to enact an activity of public meaning and making: where words

foment

a largeness of visible and invisible worlds they are a commotion of one form the voice is recognizable as fragments of a greater language, a live and changing face (Holy Forest 116; emphasis in the original)

“Speaking speaking / as if woven” (120), Blaser sounds out a dimension of public, worldly reality imaged in the scatterings of material—the “bits and pieces”—that provides the content of and context for a continuing discourse of the real. Indeed, the notion of “scattering” occurs as yet another apt description for all this work. To scatter is to throw loosely about; distribute at irregular intervals; refract or diffract (light or other electromagnetic radiation) irregularly so as to diffuse in many directions, separate and disperse; go in different directions. At its heart is a randomness, a serious

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play with precipitous actions whose outcomes can never be certain. Blaser’s poetics of scattering finds echoes in Arendt’s consideration of the originality and particularity of human activity: With each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the is the actualization of the human condition of plurality. (Human 178)

Similarly, it might be said that with each poem, something uniquely new comes into the world of language. And with each new poem comes a re-recognition of the plurality of voices that abut and adjoin the work. No single poems, no single authors. For Blaser, the related image of Orpheus provides another link to his understanding of the poem as a scattering of pieces, random necessary actions in a world that reverberates with each new act. “It is precisely in the image of the scattered body and mind of Orpheus that I place whatever I know about the poetic process—that scattering is a living reflection of the world” (NAP 242). As such a remark suggests, Blaser’s work has been deeply informed by a decidedly heterodox and multiphasic approach to the formation of cultural and poetic knowledge. His is a view of the poem and poetic process that insists upon the validity of “an activity which reveals meaning, grasps the mind of the reader, so that he is forever changed, because, if he has understood, there has been a meeting. And that meeting has permanence since it is held in public words” (“Particles” 37). Blaser’s “forest” resonates as a metaphor of precisely these instances of public and ethical concern that have been brought into relation by the poet’s recognition that, as he suggests: The Other is present and primary to our speaking. There is no public realm without such polarity of language. The operation of its duplicity is the poetic job. A peril and an ecstasy. The traffic around a heart which is heartless. The characters do not speak only of themselves, since they are images of an action. Transcendence is not a position somewhere else, but the manner of our being to any other (Merleau-Ponty). A co-existence. (“Stadium” 59; emphasis added)

This doubling of speech remains the manifest sign of a poetry committed to the splendors and terrors of thought, and recurs as a primary motif for Blaser. As Jed Rasula has remarked, “Blaser’s work is positioned with care at the

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interface of visible and invisible, thought and unthought, original and derivative. Its doubling is conjugal” (“Taking Out” 100; emphasis in the original). Alluding as it does to the combined and interrelated discourses of culture, politics, theology, and history, Blaser’s project attests not so much to the “tale of the tribe,” to recall Pound’s phrase, but to the multiple narratives of subjectivity and otherness that are by their very nature public and social realities. “I am not there where I am the plaything / of my thought,” Blaser writes, citing Lacan, in “Image-Nation 10 (marriage clothes,” “I think about what I am / there where / I do not think I am thinking” (Holy Forest 135; emphasis in the original). This “There-Where” is fundamental to Blaser’s conception of poiesis as, to paraphrase Arendt, thinking what we are doing. It is as well a portion of the idealized and real world-in-common: that space in which each of us is implicated in processes of public making that are dependent on multiple strands of individual and communal meaning and meeting. “The world is never separately—by simplicity’s trick—social, political, artistic, or sacred, but, rather, it is made of an entanglement of discourses having to do with men, women, earth and heaven” (“Recovery” 18). The image of this entanglement is one in which “the light and shadow become / the substance of men and women” (Holy Forest 129). In working through Blaser’s involvement in issues of poetic form and politics, as these are manifest in his poetry, statements on poetics, and scholarly prose, I have emphasized both the scope of his concerns and the range of materials and discourses brought to bear on a project of manifestly public concern, “the territory, the largeness, in which we try to live an think” (“Positivisms” 21). At the same time, I have underscored the ethical component of this endeavor. As in the philosophical writings of Lévinas, whose writings find resonances here, Image-Nations 1–12 evince the interrogative rigor of an ethical project that seeks to unpack the discourses of Self and Other and reclaim for poetry its public function and usefulness in the world of human activity. In the radical potential of images cast by this work, Blaser strives to recover a location, a space deep within our human and cultural memory, in which the separations that have become endemic to our public, private, and social existences may be, if not eradicated, diminished through the transformative work of a language held in common. The idealism and utopic import of such a perspective exists alongside the pervading realism of Blaser’s engagement. Between Self and Other and selves and others, Blaser situates his lifework—and, by extension, those readers who form its community—within a humane and plurivocal space of language. It remains open to each of us to locate ourselves amidst those other “awesome sweet laborers / of something” (Holy Forest 240).

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CHAPTER FIVE

“Collapsed Aura”: Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and the Poetics of Discrepant Subjectivity in “Song of the Andoumboulou”

“The Word,” said the old man, “is in the sound of the block and the shuttle.” The name of the block means “creaking of the word.” Everybody understands what is meant by “the word” in that connection. It is interwoven with the threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric . . . The weaver, he explained, sings as he throws the shuttle, and the sound of his voice enters into the warp, adding to and taking along with it the voice of the ancestors. —Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli He was aware of a need to cannibalize one’s past, to cast a fanatic, far-reaching net, no matter how apparently outlandish, no matter how apparently far-fetched. But to do so, he had to admit, was to be eaten in turn, was to be stunned by a namesake’s viper bite, was to be bled as if by a vampire’s teeth. He couldn’t escape the feeling, the heartfelt conviction, that a curious claim had been staked to his chest. A fanciful, preemptive past had laid claim to him, eating him just as he ate it. What he felt was a hunger which cut so reciprocally (two-way predator, two-way prey) that all its claims, no matter how fanciful, bore accurate, exacting witness, never ceasing to obey, even as they “embellished,” disingenuous fact or ventriloquistic truth. —Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook

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Continents of water and earth, Gaia! Time’s mother too must wear guises, hop on one leg and hide her head in a hut, dance with the rest among the maskt guys. —Robert Duncan, “The Continent”

I Where serial form functions for Blaser in his “Image-Nations” as meditative praxis for a reconsideration of the connections between public and poetic discourses, in the work of Nathaniel Mackey seriality’s jagged edges are employed to address those wandering, preternaturally exiled others of historical and cultural consciousness, what Mackey has described in his introduction to his 2002 collection of poems Splay Anthem (2006) as “a lost tribe of sorts, a band of nervous travelers, know[ing] nothing if not locality’s discontent, ground gone under” (x). It’s a potent gloss on visible form’s meeting of invisible witness, rumored selves that populate and limn the saturated and ragged lines of Mackey’s serial movement. Mackey has described his work in his ongoing serial poem “The Song of the Andoumboulou” as “Dogon deep song, Dogon cante jondo” (Splay xi). As such, this work lend itself to andoumboulous liminality, the draft unassured extension knows itself to be. Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem moves forward and backward both, repeatedly “back / at / some beginning,” repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such adamance as to call forward and back into question and suggest an eccentric step to the side—as though, driven to distraction by shortcircuiting options, it can only be itself beside itself. (xi–xii)

Laboring to find itself, establishing projected communities of ghost-like vigilance, withdrawing again, Mackey’s tactic of serial exposition suggests a refashioning of form’s fold, its grip on our senses and the paratactic imaginings of a soul (sole) survivor. In the opening, untitled poem of his first collection, Eroding Witness (1984), Nathaniel Mackey offers a resonant site map of the thematic concerns and conceptual framework that have figured largely in all his works since. The

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poem in full reads: Waters wet the mouth. Salt currents come to where the lips, thru which the tongue slips, part. At the tongue’s tip the sting of saltish metal rocks the wound. A darkness there like tar, like bits of drift at ocean’s edge. A slow retreat of waters beaten back upon themselves. An undertow of whir immersed in words. (3)

With its focus on speech in potentia (“an undertow / of whir im- / mersed in / words”), bodily injury (“the sting / of saltish / metal”), and spatial drift (“A slow // retreat of / waters beaten / back upon / themselves.”), this introductory poem serves as subtle envoi to Mackey’s poetics of “discrepant engagement.” As Mackey describes his use of this term in his book of critical essays bearing the same title: Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing resonance, dissonance, noise, seeks to remain open to them. Its admission of resonances contends

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with resolution. It worries resolute boundary lines, resolute definitions, obeying a vibrational rather than a corpuscular sense of being. It is to be at odds with taxonomies and categorizations that obscure the fact of heterogeneity and mix. (Discrepant 20)

Mackey’s entertaining of the multiple versus the singular, the body as “vibrational” rather than simply “corpuscular,” the non-canonical versus the categorizable suggests ways in which his work risks marginality and heterodox procedures to honor and investigate what Michael Harper describes in his preface to Eroding Witness as “the sounds of a mythmaker-griot in the midst of ceremonial talk, the totems of incantation, the way to the source, the origins of power” (Eroding n.p.). While Harper’s claims may seem extravagant by the standards of our present-day more provisional poetic vocabulary, his comments underscore the play of critical discernment and embodiment that is at the heart of Mackey’s project in both the poetry and fiction he’s been writing over the course of the last twenty-five years. To return to the already cited poem, Mackey’s work suggests a visibly cross-cultural understanding of the locations and positions (cultural, historical, autobiographical) that underwrite any project in the arts. Like his friend and mentor Robert Duncan, Mackey pursues a delicate balance between the “formally experimental” and the “formally conventional,” solidly aligning himself with a poetics that risks cultural marginalization and a practice that “accents fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world” (Discrepant 19). In the discussion that follows, I want to trace out the interrelated strands of Mackey’s abiding concern with fissure and fracture, two key descriptors of a writing practice that, as Mackey himself describes it in Bedouin Hornbook, attempt not so much a stutter in any precise sense of the term as a curve of articulation which whenever it is asserted would instantly qualify, even contradict itself. The sense of a receding, self-correcting, withdrawal into a cave of ancestors I found immensely attractive, a curious borderline stance between the compelling and the merely compulsive. (30)

Such work, with its conscious “withdrawal into a cave of ancestors,” has resonant linkages to a range of African Caribbean and South American traditions and orientations, and it remains one of the signal aspects of Mackey’s writing that he seeks to engage on multiple levels at once—the gnomic, discursive, and oblique instants of recognition and contemplation. Like many readers of Mackey, I am drawn to the paratactic aura of the work, its impressive

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range that engenders a cross-cultural space of what I am terming “discrepant subjectivity,” to play off Mackey’s own highly useful term. The discrepancies charted in the work—which are ideological, ethno-musicological, cultural, political, social at once—depend upon and are refracted through a network of signs and referents that complicate both our positions as readers and the positions taken up by Mackey’s variable, post-humanist speakers. In saying this, I want as well to consider Mackey’s work in context of his relationship to the work and career of Robert Duncan. This pairing, like all such constructs, is provisional, limited in its usefulness, subject to incompleteness and erroneous alignments, while at the same time allowing us to consider certain originary points of contact between these two figures. Arguably, Duncan has remained a central figure to Mackey’s poetry and poetics, from his earliest volume Eroding Witness to his most recent Splay Anthem. Mackey’s poetics are derived in part from Duncan’s staging of poetry as “grand collage,” and its verbal enticement to the multiphasic properties of language that are likewise linked to his project. In making this connection between Mackey and Duncan, I draw attention to the affinities and divergences between these two poets as a way of foregrounding the particularity of Mackey’s contribution to what is still referred to as the New American Poetry (a term that, more than fifty years after its initial use by Donald Allen, has especially ironic overtones as we complete the first decade of the new millennium and the assignation of “new” has achieved a particularly slippery quality). By better understanding the ways in which Mackey expands on certain aspects of Duncan’s project, while rejecting or qualifying others, we can more fully recognize how Mackey’s assumptive hybridity posits both a recognizably human world, dominated by figures of exile and loss, and a mythically informed (that is to say, concertedly cross-historical) realm of separation and otherness. If Duncan sought in a “symposium of the whole” a way of verifying the transcendent and universalist aspirations of human endeavor, Mackey’s project stresses the “broken claim to a connection” (Mackey, Bedouin 42) that, like Legba’s phantom limb, reminds us of both a lack and its countervailing presence as song, melos.1 Put another way, Mackey’s work rejects key tenets of lyric subjectivity (i.e., unified voice, organic form, a mimetic conception of language) in favor of a practice that asserts the inherent intertextuality and texture of poetic discourse. As Marjorie Perloff, in “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric,” has notably remarked, in moving beyond the terms of traditional lyric (at least as practiced by Anglo-American poets in the last half of the twentieth century century), postmodernist poets have sought to explore the boundaries and fissures between self and other, form and

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content, and in so doing have returned “the material so rigidly excluded— political, ethical, historical, philosophical—to the domain of poetry” (180). Perloff ’s argument, well-rehearsed here and in other essays since (“Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric” first appeared in 1984 and was subsequently included in her 1985 collection of essays, The Dance of the Intellect), relies on a conception of lyric as a decidedly outmoded practice, one whose day has long since passed except for those “minor poets” (Ammons and Strand among the two cited by Perloff ) who insist upon regurgitated versions of the neo-Romantic sublime (181). Perloff ’s distinction is especially useful in helping us delineate more clearly the procedural and aesthetic differences between poets of the Black Mountain school, say, and New Critical practitioners, such as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and so on. At the same time, as Mackey’s work makes abundantly clear, such distinctions remain useful only to a certain degree. As I have already suggested in my introduction, in separating and evaluating poetic practices as Perloff does (lyric = simplistic, inadequate, old-fashioned; postmodern = complex, thoughtful, cutting edge), she also tends to disallow the kind of mixture and tension among competing discourses and tendencies—mixtures and tensions that Mackey’s project assiduously insists upon. While it’s abundantly clear that Mackey isn’t the least bit interested in generating well-polished lyric “shorts” (à la Strand, Ammons, Gluck, et al.), his poetry engages in a speculative positioning between the kind of lyric enchantment and glamour so evident in Duncan and those elements of poetic process that can get short shrift in certain academic, critical, and reading contexts, where emphasis tends to be placed on the constructed nature of subjectivity, the mediated quality of poetic language, the limitations of poetry as a verbal art, and so on. Holding both to this more provisional, contingent understanding of the ways in which meaning is always constructed across the divides of self, culture, and language, and to the intensities of a body of spiritually informed life-writing, Mackey purposefully disrupts the kind of categories and camp-based identifications (Black Mountain, West Coast, Language writing) Perloff and numerous other critics tend to set in place.2 It’s important to recognize the ways in which poets like Mackey and the other writers discussed in this book swerve away from the binaries imposed by a critical dispensation to one or the other side of the issue. In Olson’s day, such a move was accompanied by a strong and tonic antiacademic stance. For poets of Mackey’s generation, who work within the university and make their living through teaching, writing, publishing, and so on, often in a number of different social contexts and reading communities, theorizing the complacencies and rigidities

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of various critical paradigms becomes part and parcel of the poetic project. Mackey’s sensibility as a poet-scholar-teacher is especially informed by dialogic inquiry, an interrogation of materials and form, one that suggests a requisite hybridity and undecidability as the basis of poetic practice (this career path, it should be noted, is one shared by any number of contemporary practitioners). As a poet of what I would call exegetical initiation, Mackey quite consciously departs from any easily translatable stratum of myth/presence in which we might want to locate his poetry. In situating his work in a site of undecidability and formal play and interchange, he (like Duncan) encourages multiple readings—acts of both affiliation and disaffiliation—that foreground the work’s materiality, without losing sight of its animating humanity, its ties to an ongoing dialogue with spiritual, mythological, and poetic fore-figures. What remains interesting for the purposes of my discussion here are the ways in which Mackey, in negotiating the inheritance of Anglo-American modernism in general and Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance in particular, recalibrates this set of traditions to suit his own needs. If Mackey is inclined toward Pound’s and H.D.’s emphasis on the image and Duncan’s syncretic model of composition, it is also clear that Mackey’s investment in these is linked to an asystematic, but rigorous exploration of the shamanistic, visionary, and vatic as potential, rather than programmatically reaffirming, registers of poetic discourse. To a certain degree, Mackey’s resistance to wholesale acceptance of these interrelated strands of poesis can be interpreted as intellectual (and intellectualized) qualifications of the written versus the spoken word. As Harryette Mullen pointedly observes, such a distinction goes to the heart of the complex tension present in African American writing resulting from an awareness of the ways in which “graphic systems are associated not with instrumental human communication but with techniques of spiritual power and spirit possession” (Nielsen 36). Mackey’s conscious bracketing of the “I,” the speaking subject who inhabits the poems, needs to be seen, then, in context of a reading and writing tradition that is marked in particular ways by the distinctions between voice and speech, speech and act.3 Relying on a cross-cultural mapping of such mythical figures of Ghede, Nut, and Set, Mackey posits the potentially irresolvable demands of poetic subjectivity (and persona) that comprehends its own limitations and history as inscribed Other. At the same time, he refutes the expectations and consoling narratives of a spiritual plenitude that are recalled, if not entirely embraced. To put matters another way, Mackey’s poetry suggests an ethos of spiritual yearning and cross-cultural agency that is continually mediated and, often enough, impeded by a critical and poetic disposition that

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circumvents the very same spiritual, religious, and social codes his poetic language invokes. This is a complicated proposition, one that requires discussion of Mackey’s work across several levels at once: poetic, scholarly-critical, institutional, cultural, and so on. In so doing, I shall be making no effort here to create a programmatic itinerary of cultural motifs and allusions in the poems, nor do I intend to engage in a reading of Mackey’s work based solely or even predominantly on his deployment of Africanist, Caribbean, and other nonWestern cultural belief systems and mythologies. Rather, I’m interested in the linkages between Mackey’s discrepant subjectivity as we encounter it in the poems (a subjectivity that is partly drawn—but only partly—from an orientation in African, Caribbean, and South American traditions) and the disjunction between these materials, the form in which they appear (open form/hybrid collage), and the potential audience(s) for this work. I say disjunction, though another way of framing matters might be “friction.” Part of the great attraction of Mackey’s work lies in the generative tension that develops between the poem as an expressivist medium (Mackey’s fascination with the Kaluli myth of the boy who turned into a muni bird is representative in this regard) and the poem as inscribed object. It is this tension that also creates the occasionally attenuated quality of the delivery, the undercurrents of resistance that layer the subjective mode of the poems’ address and force to the surface an inquiring, sometimes diffident presence of (in)articulate reproducibility. Thus the chronically resided in, repeatedly arrived at Nub (nubbed version Nuh), place name and diagnosis fraught with senses of diminishment: failed extension or falling short but not only that, the proverbial nub drawn back from overreaching but not only that, phantom limb’s compensated occasion but not only that, remnant wish but not only that. (Splay xv)

Agency is belated, bleak, barely professable in this line of “not only that,” which offers both speculative egress and moral tenacity to Mackey’s inconclusive cante jondo. In part, I argue here that in terms of its reception by a critical and poetic community, Mackey’s work has become a critical link in the formation of the contemporary nontraditional canon at least in part because of its undecidability, reflexivity, and elision of “direct” statement.4 Deferring the subject-centered and syntactically complete narrations of traditional first-person lyric or the propulsive “I” at the center of so much of Charles Olson’s work (an “I” that carries forward the protean modernist project of Pound’s Cantos, while instantiating a postmodernist pluralist, mobile,

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global historical consciousness in place of modernism’s “tale of the tribe”), for instance, Mackey’s poetry and fictional prose instead invest themselves in what Joseph Donahue refers to as an “intensification of incompletion,” whereby the poetry exposes “the oppressive logics which threaten to govern all actions should the hidden pronoun announce itself too casually” (63). Donahue’s comments foreground the minimization of self-expressive subjectivity at work in Mackey’s poetics, a subjectivity, it should be added, that is intimately related to his political urge to respond to the ideologies of cultural and racial hegemony that undermine efforts at otherwise investigative and potentially liberational discourses. That such an outlook forms one—but only one—theoretical backdrop to Mackey’s own poetry only makes our reading and discussion of him more complicated. For even as Mackey’s procedural strategies in Eroding Witness and School of Udhra (1993) are entirely defensible along the lines proposed by Donahue, his work also suggests an ambivalence about the nature of such critical discourses as these affect his immanent, spiritually based poetics. This rift or gap, if you will, between formal investigativeness and subjective invocation is by no means as binaried as it may sound (i.e., spiritual/ transcendent on one hand; post-structuralist/materialist on the other). But any reading of Mackey’s accomplishment as a poet cannot ignore the palpable tension between the cultural claims and assertions made by his work (its intellectual resourcefulness, multicultural and referential range) and its activity as textual matter, existing in a cultural, political, and readerly space at some remove from the liminal realm of entrenched wonder, nameless wander, it so often evokes. On one level, Mackey’s work proposes in particularly revivifying ways the problematic relation of form to content (form as content, content as form). Mackey’s work is deeply marked by its consequential recovery of African and Caribbean histories, language, and culture, especially as these relate to various aspects of the African Diaspora. In the assiduous cross-cultural scholarship that works such as “Song of the Andoumboulou” represent, one is granted at least partial entrance to a variety of cultural knowledges, including those of Islam, West Africa, and the Caribbean. On the other hand, the poems’ emotional intelligibility is continually blurred by the formal strategies that prevent any direct or immediate access to their meaning and referentiality. This is a typical characteristic of a good deal of contemporary avant-garde expression and, as Mackey notes in his discussion of Clarence Major’s work, has much to do with how we experience (or don’t) pleasure in the act of reading (Discrepant 62). I bring up this issue of formal difficulty only to highlight what I view as points of resistance and correspondence in Mackey’s daunting, intellectually dense texts. For inasmuch as Mackey’s

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work puts into question the facility and methods of more traditional, mainstream poetics, it also provides a speculative terrain for reconsideration of the ways in which culturally resonant and spiritually replete materials may find a context within the formally defamiliarizing ethos of an experimentalist poetics. Insofar as Mackey engages in the postmodernist tradition of dissonance and fragmentation, he also asserts a critical edge of thoughtfulness that resists any pat “position” or stance toward tradition as such. As he has written of the work of Duncan, Mackey seeks to “demystify tradition not by avoiding it but by engaging it head-on. He shows tradition to be porous rather than impermeable, to be fissured and incomplete rather than comprehensive and monolithic” (98). Responding to a contemporary context of post-humanist nostalgia, on the one hand, and prosthetic lyricality on the other, Mackey suggests an investment in the fashioning of an alternative tradition, one capable of bringing together William Carlos Williams and Wilson Harris, Louis Zukofsky and Kamau Brathwaite, H.D. and Harryette Mullen, relocating the ties to traditions that have been, and continue to be, under-read, under-seen. Through a synthesis of the cross-culturally pertinent and the aesthetically marginalized, Mackey raises the stakes in the hothouse of postmodernist theory and canon formation by dispensing with an approach that would single out any one mode of address or expression as sufficient. Moving between the prolix and the arcane, the palimpsestic and the improvisational, Mackey redirects the intimacies of address and subjective experience through the channels of coherency/insolvency that merge in the “gap between song and circumstance” (Djbot 49), between polyphonal play and exhortative muse. II You have to be in it when you’re in it, which is the thing that’ll take you there. —Mackey, Djbot Baghostus’s Run The numinous is felt as the presence—it is the presence—of an overwhelming power of a stone, of a man, of a fate, of a word, so that it becomes personal. —Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth

In a 1996 interview with Nathaniel Mackey that appeared in Chicago Review, Peter O’Leary asked Mackey to discuss the sense of loss that permeates his ongoing poetic work-in-progress, “Song of the Andoumboulou.” Sections of

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this poem began appearing in small magazines in the early 1980’s, and the series as a whole occupies a central position in Mackey’s four major poetry collections to date: Eroding Witness (1984), School of Udhra (1993), Whatsaid Serif (1998), and Splay Anthem (2006), which won the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry.5 As Mackey explained it: It’s finding out what you have but don’t have. You have it in the form of a disposition but that disposition is not the same as the possession of it. So you have it as a reaching-toward-something. In many ways, you have it as a reaching-through-things, so that there’s a way in which that reaching is not satisfied even when it does seize upon something. It goes on reaching . . . It speaks of loss, it speaks of lack, but it also speaks of an insufficiency that is indigenous to the very act of reaching. Reaching wants to go on, in some sense that’s troubling to things it does settle upon and take hold of. It’s not that it empties those things. It simply finds that those things are in place in a certain way that the reaching wants to continue to be free of . . . It’s that quality of discontent, it’s that refusal to be satisfied with mere material achievement— whether we’re talking about technical elocution or technical virtuosity—so I think there’s something very spiritual about it . . . These figures of ghostliness and absence and incompletion are meant to suggest a spiritual supplement to the world that both invests it with a certain urgency and divests it of any ultimacy. (38–9)

Mackey indicates later that the “song of the Andoumboulou” refers to a funeral song of the West African Dogon people—one meant to invoke the spirits of the mythical beings known as the Andoumboulou. These beings, Mackey suggests, were “an earlier form of human being who were flawed and failed to sustain themselves or failed to be the thing that human beings would eventually be” (O’Leary 39). Performed at funeraltime, the song of the Andoumboulou invokes “the spirit of the person who has died and is moving on to another realm. It’s a song of lament and rebirth” (ibid.). Here and elsewhere, Mackey makes clear that he views his poetry as part of a tradition bounded by the spiritual, ineffable, and numinous events that often go unremarked in contemporary Western daily life. In his continual allusions to non-Western religious ritual and ceremony, whether those of the Kabuli of Papua New Guinea or the Dogon of West Africa or Bedouin poets of seventh-century Egypt, Mackey’s project calls attention to the ways in which multiple mythologies and belief systems inflect daily perception and activity, bringing us into what Duncan often referred to as the “larger orders” of our human existence. As Mackey recognizes, his poetry

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remains a recuperative site of historically specific losses, recapitulated time and again, and woven through the multiple layers of autofictional, mythographic, and social history that mark his poetry as traces of a recognizable and shared Afro-Caribbean and African American past. These traces form part of what Edouard Glissant has referred to as the “cluster of narratives” (103) that inform each attempt to respond politically, socially, textually to circumstances of cultural exile and linguistic orphanhood. Mackey’s public affiliation with Duncan finds its fullest expression in the essays that comprise his work in Paracritical Hinge (2005) on Duncan’s Vietnam War poems, the earlier essays on Duncan in Discrepant Engagement (1993), especially “The World-Poem in Microcosm: Robert Duncan’s ‘The Continent,’ ” and interviews conducted over the years. As Mackey’s scholarship suggests and fruitfully works out, the connections between criticism and poetry can be generative and self-defining, as Mackey has both helped us come to a more nuanced understanding of Duncan’s accomplishment and recast the politics and poetics of that work in a light that reveals a good deal about Mackey’s own procedures and aesthetic grounding. As per Duncan’s conception of the poem as a “rite of participation,” Mackey’s work is imbued with a sense of spiritual moment, of evincible belief in the numinous meanings behind all human activity. At the same time, as is clear from his own scholarship on Duncan, Mackey remains more speculative about the degree to which contemporary poets can make claims to spiritual transcendence or otherwise “inflationary” rhetoric in the service of their art. Indeed, as evinced by his own concern about the potential abuses of the “office of poet” in Duncan’s Vietnam War period, Mackey remains dubious about the entitlements that have traditionally gone with such labels as “shaman,” “visionary,” or “poet.” If anything, his stance in both the poetry and criticism reveals the reserved, historically contingent position of deeply self-conscious utterance—a practice in which longing for the manifold pleasures and powers of Orphic song exists in uneasy tandem with discursive participation in the material realities of lived-out thought. If Mackey remains less committed in his own poetry to what in Duncan are visibly cosmological certitudes, written through the sweep and rhetorical lushness of vatic discourse, he remains profoundly attached nonetheless to Duncan’s syncretic and assimilationist range. It is this range (evidenced in the scholarship and in the ongoing prose work of The H.D. Book), in fact, that saves Duncan from the bathos and sentimentality of received, lyric feeling. Mackey’s careful attention in his critical writing to such poems as Duncan’s “The Continent” (quoted in an epigraph to this chapter) [Roots and Branches (1964)] and “A Seventeenth Century Suite” [Groundwork: Before

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the War (1984)] shows the ways in which, far from folding himself entirely in the robes of shaman or poet-priest, Duncan himself often undercuts the aspirant, aggrandizing aims of “Poetry” with his resolutely sophisticated and wide-ranging overlapping of materials, cultural content, and subjective space within the poems. Notably, it’s Duncan’s efforts to read each singular poem as part of a fuller field of energies and poetic particularities that engages Mackey’s sympathies and interest. Eroding Witness and the later School of Udhra both adhere to the poetics of procedural movement Duncan engages as he proposes dissolution of the borders separating poems. As Mackey describes it, Duncan immerses his poems in a field poetics that fuses seemingly opposing rhythms and motifs in a contrapuntal that continually invokes a certain amount of repetition, of variation on certain images, themes and turns-of-phrase is to be encountered in the work of almost every poet. Duncan’s work, however, makes use of reverberation to a degree uncommon enough to establish it as a deliberate, self-conscious maneuver. By dissolving the boundaries between poem, by having his poems echo one another insistently, Duncan put aside the notion of the discrete, self-contained poem in favor of the field concept, a practice meant to give inklings of synchronicity, the “one event” or “one time” the world ultimately is. (Discrepant 84)

The reverberant image and blurred boundaries are likewise familiar to the vocabulary of Mackey’s poetry. “Song of the Andoumboulou,” for instance, uses reverberations and amplification to form the recursive and repeated patterns that foreground the interplay between reticent ventriloquism and ambient artifice, the intertextual dissolve between “gesture and voice” that encodes within it the ventriloquized mask of an unseen, unheard, altogether present Other. In Mackey’s observable tracking of a self written in and through the languages of multiple discourses, he also shares Duncan’s clear celebration of language as logos and activity—an activity, it might be added, that is always mediated by those presences and voices of an “outside.” Such presences, underscored in both poets’ work, constitute that range of spectral, figurative, and interpersonal forces that mediate the writing, that make it “rich in echoes and anticipations” (Mackey, Discrepant 83). This understanding also marks off any traditional construct of originality as such and, instead, gives way to a more complicated and suggestive concern for the “derivative” nature of all language practice, of the ways in which anyone can be said to be following the lead of others—a process in which “lead” is left off as emergence and fusion become the forces at work. For Duncan, who consciously

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referred to himself as a derivative poet, the point is never to attain some true account of a “personal” voice, but to activate in language the processes whereby elements of personhood, voice, authorship merge in a composite space of writing. Likewise, in Mackey the impulse toward punning or “anagrammatic scat” builds from Duncan’s provisional and derivative complex of associations to sever language from its instrumental base and function in the soundscape formed by intentioned linguistic lesion, fracture, fissuring. If the work is immediately social and borrowed (in the sense of assimilating other voices into itself), then one key approach in both writing and reading must be to listen to the ways in which words themselves carry within them the signs/sounds of other words. Here, too, the derivational suggests a mode of writing whereby imitation and echoing, not originality, become the key signifiers of poetic practice. Insofar as Duncan’s derivative practice suggests a turning away from culturally dominant understandings of originality and authorship, of the poem as solely personal, Mackey makes clear that the seemingly unmediated register of the confessional poet simply was never possible for Duncan. Rather, works such as “Dante” and “A Seventeenth Century Suite” and earlier works such as “My Mother Would Be a Falconress” fold subjective particularity and autobiographical expressiveness into formally conceived projects of assiduously multiphasic presentation. Duncan’s “more mixed, more mediated approach” (Mackey, Discrepant 99), as Mackey frames it, furthers the possibility of life writing that doesn’t hold out the possibility of some “pure” expressive idealization of self, but pursues the confessional as part of the derivative, as ineluctable link to the poem’s intellectual and emotional center. Thus, as Mackey points out, Duncan will bring into the same poem qualities of numinous, inchoate experience with singular and specific incidents relating to the everyday activities and experiences of a recognizable self. If there is a danger in this “mix of the autobiographical and the mediumistic” (Mackey, Discrepant 100), it is, as Mackey notes, that the poet can become too attached to versions of otherness that merely become stand-ins for the self or the immediate audience of the poem’s address. This “solipsism” remains one of the chief targets of Mackey’s own procedural efforts, as he pushes to move beyond the claims of a received rhetoric that would fetishize loss, the unspoken and absent, as mere addenda of the poet’s lyric itinerary. Or, as Mackey phrases the matter in his essay on Duncan’s Vietnam War poems, the point remains to write beyond the limits of personality while maintaining “the richer play [in which] the outlawed or unacknowledged pathos reasserts itself . . . the passion of it, its keeping close to the heart of the matter, [that] troubles all entrenchment” (Paracritical 86).

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III I was after . . . not so much a stutter in any precise sense of the term as a curve of articulation which whenever it asserted would instantly qualify, even contradict itself. That sense of a receding, self-correcting withdrawal into a cave of ancestors I found immensely attractive, a curious borderline between the compelling and the merely compulsive. —Bedouin Hornbook

What becomes immediately apparent on first reading the work included in Eroding Witness is the range of reference mustered in service of Mackey’s project of cultural and historical recovery and uncovering. The citational mapping makes this work, on one level at least, a multi-directional and multidirective lesson in cultural anthropology. Drawing together Cuban Santería and Dogon myth, elements of the Koran and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Haitian voudoun and North African petroglyphs, Mackey’s poetry recuperates in fragmentary and shard-like clusters a panoply of both Western and non-Western spiritual and mythic beliefs and imaginal states. It is the “ghost of crossings,” as Mackey puts it in an early poem in Eroding Witness (“Parlay Chevel Ou”), that one becomes most immediately aware of in these texts. Indeed, part of the difficulty that energizes these poems rises from their wayward cultural sensibility, their splicing-together of multiple strands of myth and folklore, a processive encoding and re-envisioning of cultural materials in a presentational context that eschews narrative linearity. Situated in a discourse of ruminative rapture and oblique referentiality, poems begin in mid-phrase almost, with the naming of a potentially mythic, clearly numinous, figure of unspecified preeminence. Narrative is immediately problematized, as the speaking subject emerges in halting, stammered lines from imaged particulars of a discretely displayed scene. To cite one example of Mackey’s strategy, let me turn for a moment to “Song of the Andoumboulou: 3.” Here are the poem’s opening lines: Mute Serquet. Inside her head no house inside itself, no sun. What song there was delivered up to above where sound leaves off… (Eroding 39)

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Invocative and rhapsodic, hesitant and speculative, the lines seem to emanate from a space beyond that of the text itself. Quite simply, they radiate a textual density and an undecidability of relation and referent (Who is “Serquet”? What is “her” relation to the “us” who appears in the ninth line?) that force a reactive pause. Like Pound’s Cantos, with its dense topography of cultural allusion, nonlinear temporality, and interstitial positioning of subjects, Mackey’s poem both resists immediate access and suggests a groundwork of probative and elocutionary speech. Reading A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (1993) by George Hart, we find the following with regard to a figure named Serket: Serket is usually represented as a lady whose head is surmounted by a scorpion with its tail raised ready to sting. The earliest reference to her entry into the Egyptian pantheon occurs in the first dynasty on the stela of Merika from Saqqara. In the Pyramid Age she has a protective role around the throne of the king . . . However, her most important role seems to be connected with the funerary cult. Her epithet, ‘lady of the beautiful house’ refers to her association with the embalmer’s tent. She is one of the tutelary goddesses on each side of the canopic chest containing the mummified viscera of the deceased, in four jars. (192)

As throughout Mackey’s poetry, the mis-spellings are purposeful significations of alteration, drift, anagrammatic play. In another sense, Mackey’s response to the under-heard echoes of language, the misheard within single words, leads to a generative forgetfulness, a speech of intermedial act and roguish agency. As Mackey suggests in “Sight-Specific, Sound Specific . . . ” in a discussion of his initial mis-remembering of the appearance of the word “stare” from Duncan’s “Structure of Rime XIX”: I’d read this poem a number of times but I’d evidently forgotten that the word was stare. I heard it as stair. To hear it so was to “mishear” it—in quotes because to hear it was to be true to the passage’s play on the fact that a stare under closed lids is no stare, an eclipsed or suspended stare if not the inversely capable, inner sight or ascent suggested by stair, the mind’s eye the passage both advocates and opens. The life of the word resides in such variable apprehension, a congeries of apprehension its power to perform concatenates. (Paracritical 229; emphasis in the original)

Mackey’s discussion usefully highlights the auditory refraction that can occur when we mis-hear a word, mis-seeing it as well, so that inversion and

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replacement become the figures of poetic intellection. In the poem cited earlier, then, the change of Serket to Serquet (as with the later change of Nummo to Nommo) builds into the process of poetic naming a slippage, a gap between the “original” referent and its later, contemporary form. “It’s a transformation,” Mackey suggests in his interview with O’Leary. And it’s a case in point of the fact that these traditions—the mythology, the lore—are not being gone to as some kind of fixed, given entity that one then has to have a subservient relationship. They are active and unfinished; they are subject to change; they are themselves in the process of transformation and transition. (35)

And this process of transformation, it needs to emphasized, occurs at the material level of language, in the creases and folds of linguistic errancy that endow the work with such splayed meaning. Knowing that Serqu/ket refers to a figure in Egyptian mythology helps clarify to some degree the “who,” while it doesn’t explain entirely Serqu/ ket’s role in this poem. Or how Mackey’s recuperation of this figure serves to resolve the historically impinged otherness at the heart of its displacement: Embraced, but on the edge of speech though she spoke without words, as in a dream. (Eroding Witness 39)

In simple terms, Serqu/ket here would seem both embraced by the poet and statically figured in a dream-like state, in which she communicates without language, standing on the “edge of speech.” Or, as Mackey describes an encounter with jazz vocalist Betty Carter in Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), “I was struck by her inversion of conventional ventriloquism’s motionless lips and expressionless face, by the way the wealth of labial gesture and facial projection she resorted to metathetically altered the ventriloquial formula” (155). The attendant shift in perspective and narrative in the poem’s succeeding lines is jarring: The loincloth, he said, is tight, which is so that it conceals the woman’s sacred parts.

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But that in him this worked a longing to unveil what’s underneath, the Word the Nommo put inside the fabric’s woven secret, the Book wherein the wet of kisses keeps. (Eroding Witness 39–40)

Pulling apart the extraordinarily compressed aspects of the myth narrative buried in these lines requires at the very least a knowledge of where to look. But, even before this, the reader needs to move as quickly as Mackey does in shifting cultural motif and scene with a break, followed by the lines, “The loincloth, he / said, is tight.” Clearly, we’re no longer talking about Serqu/ket. Who then? Referring to Griaule’s already cited Conversations with Ogotemmêli (1965), we find that the Nummo (spelled Nommo) exist in Dogon culture as “two homogenous products of god, of divine essence like himself ” (18). The narrative content of Mackey’s lines concerns a retelling of the origins of vegetation and plant life on earth. As related by Griaule: The Nummo, looking down from Heaven, saw their mother, the earth, naked and speechless, as a consequence no doubt of the original incident in her relations with the God Amma. It was necessary to put an end to this state of disorder. The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions. They took ten bunches of these fibres, corresponding to the number of their ten fingers, and made two strands of them, one for the front and one for the behind. To this day masked men still wear these appendages hanging down to their feet in thick tendrils. (19–20)

The mythic source material for Mackey’s poem is revealing on a number of levels: first of all, it serves as a kind of “mystical” vocabulary for Mackey’s own spiritual reaching. Second, and more importantly perhaps, it enables Mackey to conjoin Dogon belief in the divine and magical properties of the Nummo with his effort to reinscribe in contemporary poetic discourse a fabulistic account of the origins of language, as it appears in a seminal tale of West African mythology: In these fibres full of water and words, placed over his mother’s genitalia, Nummo is thus always present . . . Thus clothed, the earth had a language,

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the first language of this world and the most primitive of all time. Its syntax was elementary, its verbs few, and its vocabulary without elegance. The words were breathed sounds scarcely differentiated from one another, but nevertheless vehicles. Such as it was, this ill-defined speech sufficed for the great works at the beginning of all things. (Griaule, Conversations 20)

Mackey’s precise use of this portion of the myth is not explicit; yet its position as a cross-cultural referent of linguistic portent is indisputable: a trace of recovered knowledge, both severed from and sutured to the embodied enjambment of bodily acquisition. It is a sound state that proposes an assumptive subjectivity in the face of itinerant loss. The poem’s concluding lines convey a similar elemental mystery and polyvalent meaning to that with which the “Song” began: Mouth that moved my mouth to song, her mouth would not be touched. She kept to one side of my talk like a man, to herself. My lips moved, a music. Unheard of. (Eroding Witness 40)

Both silent and speaking, beckoning and vanishing, Mackey’s liminal (female) figure finally is folded into a mystifying (and potentially mystificatory) space of preeminent longing.6 Part of what attains from a reading of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 4” is the mesh of constructed subjectivity, the separations between I-Other, SelfNot Self. Beyond the problems of reference and source-laden meaning (and certainly for some readers the obscurity of reference will pose problems, at least on an initial reading), the real issues posed by this poem—as by the bulk of the work in Eroding Witness—remains that of subjectivity (cultural, historic, interpersonal) and poetic address. Specifically, how does one go about constructing subjectivity from fragments, partial and incomplete narratives of cultural, historical, and social reality? How does the poet form a language capable of uttering the realities and recognitions impressed by such

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loss? Finally, to whom does he/she address work that is at once intimately tied to ineffable actuality and cosmological supplementarity? Knowing who Serquet is/was in the poem mentioned earlier or the role of the Nommo and Dogon cultural belief provide entry points into the work and become crucial in any further considered reading of Mackey’s intentions and meanings. But the crux of the matter is still the pinioned particulars that go toward establishing a place from which the “I” manages to speak to a “you” at all. Insofar as this and other poems in the series propose a composite identity grafted from a range of citational particulars, they as well raise in profound ways issues of authenticity and form. Once again, the subjective “voice” of these poems cannot be separated from the discursive strategies Mackey has chosen. Nor can these strategies themselves be considered apart from the narratives of cultural and spiritual value that are lodged so carefully at the poem’s meditative center. All assertions of authenticity are inevitably accompanied by versions of accountability and truthfulness that are aspects of larger discourses of cultural and social relation. The artwork that seeks to investigate, rather than corroborate, central narratives and discourses of culture and subjectivity risks being labeled inauthentic or otherwise untruthful in its account.7 In the experimental postmodern artwork, this problem is revivified as form and content exist in an often uneasy relation of fragmented narratives and seemingly a-referential language. Following from this, one reading of Mackey (decidedly not the one put forth here) would impose upon him a relation between form and content that goes something like this: Given the plenitude of spiritual address and ritualistic belief present in Mackey’s poetry, why does he compromise the “essential” characteristics of “voice” and “self” through an investment in formal and linguistic displacement? Why all the discursive blockage when on another level the work seems so assiduously to be pushing toward ecstasy, release, numinous apprehension? Mackey has responded in part to these questions in some of his own commentary, notably “Destination Out” and “Expanding the Repertoire,” which sketch out a variegated approach to the problems of subjectivity in an African American critical context that would have us more often than not unify the form-content issue. In so doing, Mackey suggests that we risk making inadequate and faulty assumptions about the ways in which writing by black writers somehow needs to amplify its meaning through a univocal discourse, one whose resistances and politics are easy to identify (and commodify). As Mackey frames the matter in “Destination Out,” what he terms as “centrifugal work” will “bid all givens goodbye.” Moreover, he suggests that black centrifugal writing has been and continues to be multiply marginalized. Why should it be otherwise? At a time when academic and critical

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discourse battens on identity obsession (even as it “problematizes” identity), black centrifugal writing reorients identity in ways that defy prevailing divisions of labor. In the face of a widespread fetishization of collectivity, it dislocates collectivity, flies from collectivity, wants to make flight a condition of collectivity. It says that “we” was never a swifter fiction—not so much a war between family and flight as the familial song of one’s feeling for flight. It says that only such admitted fugitivity stands a ghost of a chance of apportioning prodigal truth. (2005 239)

If such an approach brackets identity and collectivity as suspect concepts of a movement that would ground such terms in the easy acquiescence of normative categories, it also resonates with a refusal to view avant-garde or experimental work by African American writers as anything other than “innovative, demanding and/or outside to the extent that it addresses the wings and resistances indigenous to its medium qua medium” (Mackey, Paracritical 239). The plurality of Mackey’s own approach in his poetry likewise anticipates the questions that I’ve been raising here, questions that go to the heart of experimental writing, particularly that by African American writers As Mackey puts the matter in “Expanding the Repertoire,” we need to be cautious in our use of the term “innovative,” since it raises the question, “Compared to what?” Moreover, our dependence on this term to inscribe a discourse of method suggests a general tendency to think of innovation, especially when it’s taken to be related to or synonymous with experimentation, as having to do with method, more specifically, to do with the pursuit of greater complexity and sophistication in technical and formal matters, greater self-consciousness and complication with regard to questions of mediation. (Paracritical 240)

But, as Mackey argues, such an approach, when used to describe African American writing, has tended to close down the discussion to matters of perspective, granting black writing a place at the cultural table because of its “unique” grounding in the subject considered the subject of the black writer, that is, “its report on the one thing African Americans are regarded as experts on—racial victimization” (ibid.). Accompanying this narrowing of perspective is what Mackey terms the “canons of accessibility and disclosure that are viewed as diametrically opposed to the difficulty attributed to formally innovative or experimental work” (2005 240). What this oversimplification of content means in the case of black writers who exceed the boundaries cast by such proscriptive designations is a kind

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of erasure, an invisibility that goes hand in hand with dominant cultural notions of African American literary practices that view racial subjectivity as uniform and uniformly expressed. “Oversimplification along exactly such lines,” Mackey argues, “contributes to the relative invisibility of African American writing that seeks to advance content outside the prescribed or expected limits and/or to be formally innovative or experimental” (Paracritical 241). The consequences of these “racialized dichotomies” has been, often enough, a refusal to comprehend work that ponders the connections between difficulty and form, reinscribes conventionality and innovation as overlapping discourses of sympathetic discord, while seeking to break through the “grid of expectations enforced by such dichotomies” (240). Put another way, where Pound or Zufkofsky or H.D. continue to be read in light of a modernist discourse of probative analysis and intellection, one that accepts as given the difficulty and sometimes formidable resistances imposed by such work, often enough in turning to writing by African American poets the move is toward a valorizing of the direct, the simple (or its affective resemblance), the methodologically uncomplicated. “Limits are what any of us are inside of,” Charles Olson has suggested. From a critical and poetic perspective, the limits imposed on black writing continue to exert a profound influence on how we respond to work such as Mackey’s, for whom the tag of innovative writing is both apt and sorely inadequate. Exerting pressure on the seam between “difficulty” and “accessibility,” language as logos and language as “sign of estrangement” (Splay xvi), Mackey’s poetry suggests a useful extension of Duncan’s organist and Romantically informed procedures. While Duncan compromises the vatic and Orphic registers far less, Mackey’s work also reveals the complex interchange between discursive form and subjective particularity. If poems such as Duncan’s “Apprehensions” and “After a Passage in Baudelaire” more clearly participate in the jouissance of language and the rapturous lyricality that can attend such efforts, they also contain within them the seeds of a more speculative, less triumphal expressivity. Mackey’s own poetry, to be sure, negotiates carefully between elevated and investigative discourses, which is one reason reading his work to some degree presents a greater measure of difficulty; quite simply, it resists, refuses to give back, in the ways that more conventional reading practices have taught us to expect.8 The work attests, formally and referentially, to a profound schism between speaking and knowing, between subject and audience. With primary threads of lyric address frayed, Mackey’s work travels an uneasy road between the lush lyric surfaces of Duncan’s work (especially during his middle period) and the graphemically and formally disruptive modes of other contemporary

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African American poets such as Norman Pritchard, Stephen Chambers, Amiri Baraka, and others. Yet a good deal of Mackey’s own thinking-through of the twin issues of poetic form and subjectivity can be traced back to the syncretic and non-totalizing narratives of self and other found in Duncan’s work. As I’ve already suggested, Duncan’s identification of himself as a derivative poet leaves him open as well to the charges of inauthenticity and unoriginality (e.g., he’s just copying the work of others). At the same time, foregrounding derivation gains for Duncan an enormous amount of poetic capital, allowing him to assert this as a working principle of his practice, accomplished through conscious shaping and shifting of stylistic and formal particulars. While Duncan’s fashioning of himself on the model of other poets (H.D., Pound, Stevens) remains a conspicuous aspect of all his work in ways that it does not in Mackey, both men share a similarly nuanced regard for the ways in which “authenticity” remains only one criteria of poetic production—and is itself subject to other pressures and concerns that come from outside the work. Put another way, Mackey and Duncan both pursue a course that is less dependent on received notions of originality and more concerned with tracing linkages between a signature style, say, and the formal experience offered by the poem. And, as Mackey has suggested in his critical writing on the subject, the degree to which we judge one work (or version of self therein) as authentic and another as inauthentic is wholly dependent upon our expectations of what a poem should sound/look like. Like Duncan’s derivative “I,” Mackey’s cross-cultural subject in “Song of the Andoumboulu” suggests not so much a “true” account of experience as a layered, often oblique, narrative of incomplete motive and origin. His work (more directly than Duncan’s) confronts the fractured position of the speaking subject to suggest a focal point of discursive, as well as identifiably “derivative,” energies. Putting into question the logics of any manifest or unified subjectivity, Mackey blunts the transcendent edge of lyricality in scat-phrased lines that don’t permit easy translation into the vocabulary of a refracted plenitude. In so doing, Mackey enacts what can be understood as a deeply painful (and ethically significant) recognition of the self’s amputation (in the face of a former amplitude). Here, the limping figure of Legba remains a powerful motif throughout Mackey’s engagement of culturally specific loss and displacement: The master of polyrhythmicity and heterogeneity, [Legba] suffers not from deformity but multiformity, a “defective” capacity in a homogeneous order given over to uniform rule. Legba’s limp is an emblem of heterogeneous wholeness, the image and outcome of a peculiar remediation. Lame

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or limping, that is, like phantom, cuts with a relativizing edge to unveil impairment’s power, as though the syncopated accent were an unsuspected blessing offering anomalous, unpredictable support. Impairment taken to a higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into a dance. (Discrepant 244)

If the “authentic” lived self cannot be translated into texts of unity and unmediated belief, then the limp that is a phantom limb at the back of each endeavor must be acknowledged and brought to the fore; this loss must be recognized as the first form of identifiable self. Asserting the haunted and haunting, Mackey reinscribes poetic subjectivity in a region of phantomic wandering: All those other earlier entrances of light it now wants to recollect come crashing to the floor, so many repeats of an incumbent loss. (Eroding Witness 51)

Mackey’s cross-cultural figure registers in our consciousness as a flickering representation of historical and personal loss. There is no recovery possible, Mackey suggests, only the haunted reminders of a potential never-was.9 It is this twin recognition of the mobility and fixity of cultural memory that saturates Mackey’s work and makes available to us states of feeling not yet compromised by the ideological fiction of a unified subject. Mackey’s evocation is that of a principled and plangent seer—alternately disposed to and suspicious of the claims seemingly afforded by his position. As he frames the matter in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 6,” addressed to the figure “Angel of Dust”: We not only can but should speak of “loss” or, to avoid, quotation marks notwithstanding, any such inkling of self-pity, speak of “absence” as unavoidably an inherence in the texture of things (dreamseed, habitual cloth). You really do seem to believe in, to hold out for some first or final gist underlying it all, but my preoccupation with origins and ends is exactly that: a pre (equally post, I suppose) occupation. (Eroding Witness 50)

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Without overstating matters, it would be fair to say that Mackey’s attachment to a poetics of cross-culturality and critique owes much to this stance of poeisis as reserve, as prerequisite knowledge. If Mackey resists firing up the machinery of lyric at every turn, in part he does so out of a deep ethical concern for the costs involved, literally a life’s work, of violating what amounts to a pact between poet and poem and poem and reader (who in turn becomes a maker of poetic meaning). Such resistance is suggestive as well of another aspect of Mackey’s continual struggle to forge an authentic speaker, one capable of mediating the competing claims on his own speculative journey. In working-through motifs of authenticity and verisimilitude in the scattered, disjunctive format of his poem’s liminally achieved voicings, Mackey’s work suggests a troubled recognition of the ways in which all individuals in contemporary culture must continually confront the dilemma of their own subjectivity— aware that each retrieval and position is accompanied by another, variably real, sense of personhood. In this regard, Mackey’s poems (especially those from the earlier stages of his career) remain open-ended meditations on the occasions of self-fashioning. They respond to the multiple forces of ethnic, religious, and racial identity (and identification) that are changeable within varying social and cultural contexts, thus allowing for a far more fluid conception of the self. Here, any notion of an essential personhood or subjectivity has all but lapsed, giving way to multiple configurations and positions, haunted and hidden at the same instant. As Mackey puts it in his preface to Splay Anthem, we are engaged in reading “a sign of estrangement,” and must be aware of the potential risks as we do so, for “to poeticize or sing is to risk irrelevance, to be haunted by poetry’s or music’s possible irrelevance” (xvi). In ways that shed light on Mackey’s “sign of estrangement,” James Clifford’s cultural anthropological work offers a reconsideration of the serious fictions of cultural identity by any of us in contemporary society may understand ourselves. Probing what is meant by such descriptors as Native/ Non-Native, African American, Latino, and so on, Clifford provides a critical reassessment of the ways in which any subject position can be said to be “real” or “innate.” Clifford’s work has been fundamental to a rethinking of the standard and generally accepted categories of ethnic/racial identity in the context of fragmented social practices and cultural displacements in which the reality of any one group or community exposes the rift between the collective and the individual who identifies with or is identified by participation in that group. Clifford’s commentary has special relevance to Mackey’s own explorations of visible/nonvisible identities in poetic work

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that refuses the essentializing narratives of identity to forge a space of intermedial concern: Intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees, “inauthentic”: caught between cultures, implicated in others. Because discourse in global power systems is elaborated vis-à-vis, a sense of difference or distinctness can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition. Identity is conjectural, not essential. (11)

Similarly, Mackey’s poems in Eroding Witness propose the “inauthenticity” of the always composed, always constructed subject—one partitioned by multiple identities and the fluctuating signifiers of cultural naming, none of which can be said to be essential. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5,” which bears the culturally resonant subtitle “gassire’s lute,” suggests just such a working through and out of these issues. The poem (which recalls the ancient tale of Gassire, whose luteplaying results in the loss of the city of Wagadu) begins: “And because I was lost / because I labored in the throes / of an angry birth” (44). The “I” is both composite of legendary loss, recursive witness of its own becoming, and the fractured emblem of authorial subjectivity—held tightly in the interwoven space of cross-cultural reference. Haunted by the memory of what he has lost, Mackey’s “witness” recalls the lights of some inviolable City, thoughts gathered like beads, round a witch’s neck. All knot of thumbs, round each other like vines we’d vomit light, would let each breath imbibe an inlet of dust. (Eroding Witness 47)

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Both an attempted recovery of the lost city of Wagadu and an oblique acknowledgment of the impossibility of such redemption, the poem retraces the manner in which any narrative of cultural identity is refracted, repositioned, splintered almost beyond recognition. Mackey’s language, rather than giving itself over to the impressionistic nostalgias of unified subjectivity and fixed cultural position, suggests instead the composite, incomplete nature of each attempt to articulate identity and relation to those who make up one’s social world. Instead of the certitudes of Adamic naming, Mackey’s poem concedes The slight rub of untongued voices. The splintered reed of our Moroccan moan. (Eroding Witness 46)

In the crisis of contingent identification and distressed subjectivity proposed by the poem’s forceful fracturing of line and its methodological deconstruction of syntactical completion, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5” echoes aspects of cultural critique proposed by Edward Said in his book, After the Last Sky: A part of something is for the foreseeable future gong to be better than all of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation . . . The heroism of anger over the begging bowl, limited independence over the status of clients. Attention, alertness, focus. To do as others do, but somehow to stand apart. To tell your story in pieces, as it is. (150; Emphasis in the original)

These sentiments, which have clear consequences for the writing of Eroding Witness, find resonance as well in Mackey’s own discussion of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris in his chapter on Harris in Discrepant Engagement. As Mackey suggests there, “Displacement and relativizing distance account for the resonances and agitations at work in the text, an animated incompleteness whose components tend toward as well as recede from one another, support as well as destabilize one another” (258). In the intermix and echoing of “some recollected joining,” Mackey preserves a space of dialogue with those traditions to which his poetry alludes

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and, simultaneously, enacts a poetic of skeptical chant, of parphrastic utterance: so we sing, as if in the place of some remembered hall, some recollected joining, the instants outdistancing touch, dead air dusted clean of any inmost want (Eroding Witness 49)

IV that stutter I had heard in some dark summer freedom startles & slips from fingertip to fingerstop into the float of the morning into the throat of its sound Kamau Brathwaite

Where the poems of Eroding Witness seek to forge an identity wedged between the numinous and the terrestrial, between vatic consciousness and diurnal expectancy, the work in School of Udhra (an eight-year gap separates the publication of these two volumes) more forcefully confronts the nature of graphemic statement as it relates to subjective modes of experience. The focus of this work is as much on the problem of speaking as it is on recapitulating individual, spiritual, and cultural losses. Where Eroding Witness preserved at least elements of a situational immediacy that allowed the poems in that book to “court their lack” (as Mackey phrases it in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 7”), School of Udhra complicates the presentational impulse in work that undercuts still further the emotive and subjective registers. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 14,” which carries the suggestive subtitle “uninhabited angel” (a perhaps intentional evocation of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”), Mackey begins by asking “Again what speaks of speaking” (School 12). The poem becomes a lament and progressively fractured engagement of the “lost aura” (13) that is both the focus and the abject center of Mackey’s investigative mode. In lines that progress across and down the page and register a patterned discord between right and left margin, Mackey critiques his own maneuvers as a poet marked by those Diasporic

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voices that he would revivify and serve: Wandering stone, something whispered in my ear, lost course . . . Bent voice, an evaporative kiss, wet quivering lip. Quick bit of emptiness, bedouin window I peeped in thru, rope unraveling turned me, torn, unstrung . . . (School 12)

Mackey’s language traces a jagged course between associative discursiveness (“wandering stone,” “quivering lip,” “bedouin window”) and the obliquely registered “I” who serves as the site of an absence the poem is at great pains to comprehend and articulate: Thread of nothingness, needle of light I laid hands on. Lidless. Lip split, stitched . . . Infectious wind strung with leper’s bells, shrill sermon. Twisted neck, net bursting with light. (School 13)

In its self-conscious movement from one perceived object to another, the poem abjures any easy relation between reader and text or, for that matter, between writer and poem. Where “Ghede” suggested the nearexultant position of a ventriloquized other, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 14” lays bare the problematic relation of a poet to forces that supersede understanding and imperil any easy parlay of spiritual essence into poetic product: Burst of adrenaline. Dreamt I was dreaming, drugged, boated back and forth between ruts. Reign of sameness, flat magicless world said I’d eventually see it. Cost me myself,

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wooed me.

Wouldn’t say when.

Saw by light so abrupt I stuttered. Tenuous angel I took it for. Took it for lips, an incendiary kiss, momentary madonna. Took it for bread, condolences, cure . . . (School 13–14)

Haunted by the spectral presence of the seventh-century Bedouin poets whose tradition provides a thematic architecture for the School of Udhra, Mackey’s language suggests the discursive construct of the dream-state, as the poem’s speaker seeks to move beyond the “reign of sameness.” As Mackey reminds us, “Dream is a school of ancestors, one of the altered states in which the dead reappear, one of such states that we in these pages pursue” (Splay xiii). Yet, as he is also aware, each attempt to recover these altered states, to reinvigorate dream’s hold on consciousness, risks an alignment with forces that supersede one’s grasp on reality and threaten to expose the subject to estrangement and difficulty of a very different kind. In this pursuit, there is no immediate gratification to be had from inspiration; mistakes may be made in apprehending too quickly that which could turn out to be merely an uninhabited angel. Mackey’s poem suggests a careful sorting-through of the spiritual imperatives his work simultaneously invokes and hesitates before. Neither fully claiming the space of “ecstatic love-death” (O’Leary 36) that is the mark of the Bedouin poet nor entirely giving in to the skeptical, poststructuralist formulations of subjectivity and language that also form part of Mackey’s conceptual framework, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 14” seeks an aesthetic, intrapsychic, and reflexive middle position that neither entirely confirms nor refutes its origins in a poetics of “non-ultimacy” (Splay xii). In this, Mackey’s work somewhat resembles that of Blaser, who similarly draws from a pool of post-humanist yearning while keeping a stern eye on the materials at hand, on the tangible cultural matter of which the poem and its language are constructed. While Blaser (like Duncan) situates his work in a decidedly more lyrical and Orphic context than Mackey, one could view Blaser’s ongoing series, “Image-Nations,” as traveling a parallel course to Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou.” Both works register in profound and telling ways the break between cultural life and the fractured “I,” whose experiences remain contingent and inchoate parts of an ongoing (poetic) narrative. As Blaser has it in

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“Image-Nation 13 (the telephone”: he steps forward so suddenly himself and another a movement, a fold of the real that should be the image of himself returned, he thought (Holy Forest 143)

It is this discrepancy between the observable self and the numinous particularity of the imaged world—a “cosmology,” to use one of Blaser’s favorite terms—that informs Mackey’s own poetry of fragments, experiential clusters, nonnarrative splinters. If Mackey’s work finally undercuts what might be thought of as performative subjectivity (the illusion or delusion of a direct “I” speaking to an equally explicit “you”) our own sometimes muted responses as readers can be seen as partly resulting from Mackey’s engagement in modes of expression that are simultaneously revealing and oblique. The pleasures of Mackey’s work are many, yet there also remains an attenuated quality—a reserve of feeling, if you will—that his poetry evokes and summons forth. As one who is sympathetic to Mackey’s project, I note this only to suggest the aura of contained and privatized feeling Mackey’s work so often projects, its dislodged, dislocated voicing that impedes easy translation into narratives of readerly comfort. We must work our way carefully, attending as Mackey does to each “echo and rearticulation, riff and recontextualization, alteration and reconception” (Splay xii—xiii). Mackey’s choice to limn the content of a fractured rhapsody must be viewed as both a profoundly ethical (that is to say, poetic) act, one that is situated along the divide of linguistic refraction, and as pre-verbal impulse. Mackey’s keen awareness of “a kind of raspiness in the discrepant mix of materials” (O’Leary 40) and his willingness to forgo fuller participation in the rapturous, celebratory modes available to him through lyric discourses are deeply political recognitions of the provisional space that a nontraditional, cross-cultural poetic practice can explore in our postmillennial era. As I’ve indicated throughout my discussion, the position Mackey takes in his poetry is one that makes suspect the claims and exhortative designs of the “traditional” Western lyric, while simultaneously seeking linkages to the formidable cultural power preserved in the formal and subjective modes of lyric form and address. In comments that bear heavily on his own project in cross-cultural poetry and prose, Mackey suggests that the position of postmodern lyric itself is what is partly at stake in his

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reworking of the tradition: It’s a funny situation, because the lyric has a bad name for being subjective and solipsistic on the one hand, and it has another bad name for being inflated and reaching for positive transcendence in some fatuous way. Obviously the lyric, when it is speaking to us in that compelling and convincing way that it does, is doing something that is neither one of those extremes but is somewhere in between. It’s in some kind of liminal state and is acknowledging the claims of the particular, and the limitations that go along with that, along with the aspirations to, and inklings of, some liberation from those limitations that might be available to us. (Foster 51)

As Mackey makes clear, his project must be judged along this continuum of revisionary urgency and speculative critique. Mackey’s “vatic scat” is itself a position of strength within the poetry, even as it revivifies the problematic nature of a poetics invested in the propositions of a post-humanist praxis. In the “trashed ecstasy” that remains among these poems’ most incisive aftereffects of subjective and cross-cultural engagement, Mackey suggests that each new attempt to claim a place of visionary witness and ecstatic union exists in uneasy alliance with other, more difficult recognitions, inarticulate and near-silent, which is not to say without presence. Insofar as totalities are rejected in favor of particularities, transcendence in favor of well-traversed limits, the poems likewise offer themselves as provisional, intentionally reticent accounts of “Bound I. Insubordinate / Us” (School 10).

AFTERWORD

Toward a Poetics of Mutual Understanding

If we are to exist, a we of an imagination of more than one, a veritable multiplicity! What a day it is—what one of many days and many people who live here. —Robert Creeley, “Dying” Now that the song has flown the tree shakes, rustling in the wind, with no stars of its own, for all the nets of words are gone. The lady holds nothing in her two hands cupt. The catches of the years are torn. And the wood-light floods and overflows the bowl she holds like a question. Voices of children from playgrounds come sounding on the wind without names. —Robert Duncan, “Doves”

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I Reading from an old artist’s sketchbook I used as a notebook in the early 1990s, I find this quote from H.D.’s “Amaranth”: Turn if you will from the path for one moment seek a lesser beauty and a lesser grace, but you will find no peace in the end save in her presence.

A line is drawn across the center of the page and below it, my words: I have no mother. You—the one I lost— Circumference.

Another line, centered, below which: Passion is the waning [wanting?] motion His days going— One end—mine.

I don’t remember what I was trying to assert or tease out from H.D.’s language, what I saw or thought I understood at the time. But, as so many entries from that period suggest, I was, if nothing else, seeking to understand my “calling” as a poet, what it meant, could mean to write poetry. Often the language spilled inward: flickers of clarity, meaning, convergence around certain narratives (loss of female presence, often a mother figure or beloved), charged with meanings that remained unsaid, traced in outline form, elliptical, shot through with unsureness. I wept the years— wounded worded where you roamed—my old father— Rose in the Spirit House— Love’s shadow— “The body is a permanent way—”

The dashes—emulating Dickinson’s—signified a state of wordlessness before what I would say, but couldn’t. Splinters of lyric piercing a body of

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statement that could never quite be identified. An opacity in search of clarity. And refusing it at every turn. What had I understood, then, of H.D., whose work was, is, invested in clarities of person and language that my own work from this time so clearly shies away from? Shell and shield. The way is clear through the hours— Near muted—a sound past calling—recasts no stone— Iron in the mouth.

Returning to this work nearly twenty years later, I ask: What was I trying to say? Something was stuck in my throat, some speech I couldn’t draw out of myself. A blockage, gap, difficulty in breathing, out of my body, not in my body. The language eluded me. No matter how much I wrote it was as if the words related to nothing concrete, certain, real . . . As Peter Middleton frames his own struggle to put words to paper in The Inward Gaze (1992): For a long time I couldn’t write because no wording seemed sufficient for the head of pressure that had built up. I stared out the window in various places at the roads and cars and houses. Sometimes I closed one eye, and aligned the road sign, the vertical strut in the window frame and my pencil in my other eye, but when I reopened my closed eye they fell back into their happy distances, and their colours and outlines looking liked nothing that could be drawn up. (2)

The anomie and blockage Middletown describes here are familiar in their characteristic pall, the arrest of movement as the world around me fell back into distances. If I understood my role as a writer—a poet—at all in those days, I did so under the extreme pressures of the simultaneous need to reveal then-inarticulate formations of my own developing sense of manhood with the desire to produce work that represented readable versions/imitations of the poets I was then encountering for the first time. The bind, as I see it now, was that the latter continually impeded the former, forcing out of view the more difficult, intransigent but necessary steps toward some clearer hold on what I needed to say, had to say, must say. As I would find my way to those poets who (I thought) could more clearly articulate in language what I myself both avoided and sought out, writing often became a kind of ventriloquising of those I read. Clayton Eshleman’s Novices: A Study of Poetic

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Apprenticeship (1989), a work directed in particularly revealing ways to male poets at the early stages of their careers, speaks to this particular condition of silencing, of a kind of muteness that takes the form of a doubling, a mouthing of the words of others: You are not who you think you are, you are something to be imagined. Your inertia, your masa confusa, is your spectre, and your spectre is not only to be scrutinized and cut apart, it is to be accepted and embraced. I am not my background, the novice cries, I am not merely a mass of assignments, restrictions, impulses, and black thoughts about others—but once I subtract all these—what do I have? At this point, poetry intensifies its glow on the horizon. I am that, the novice cries out again, I am those words of e.e. cumings, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda, Rimbaud. (9)

Did I know enough to move beyond the shadows of this work? Was I up to the task? What did I want from poetry? The questions, haphazard, without clear answers, came fast and furious in those early days of figuring out, past the autobiographical obliquities of my own past, where I stood, what that place looked like. And turning again and again to that “triple-bladed gesture” of affiliation and imitation, self-silencing, and impenetrable forms. Another element, found here in Pierre Joris’s A Nomad Poetics (2003), restores for me some clarity to the problem of whose language we, any of us, write, how difficult it remains to identify, to claim for oneself a position within language and syntax, when each of these seems to claim us, position us, as we write. But the letter I was thinking of was that first letter of the word missing, which is also the first letter of the word mother. This is what happened to the language: it went from mother tongue to other tongue. At times when I stand up, on my own two legs, limbs, like right now in front of you, I have the hubris to claim that it was I who lopped it off, though when I sit down & face my job, writing, it becomes clear that this letter fell off on its own accord somehow & that it is in the gap between mother-tongue/other-tongue that I am written. (65)

It is this absence, a similar gap between sound and sense, we find in Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” its rhythmic stutters and gapped measure balanced between lack and loss: What we read said there’d been a shipwreck. We

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survived it, adrift at sea . . . An awkward spin it all got, odd aggregate. Occupied. Some said possessed . . . Buoyed by lack, we floated boatlike, birdlike, bones emptied out inside. —“Song of the Andoumboulou: 40”

II Like Duncan, I was adopted, have been cross-eyed since birth, my left eyelid always slightly lower than my right. My birth parents were both Greek; my adopted mother, British, and my father, Polish. It was only when I read Duncan’s “A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s Birthday, September 10, 1959Finished October 24, 1959” that I understood, that it hit me, some part of what I had been seeking, what I was after, as I confronted the subterfuge of expression that disabled the subject of my work, made it incomprehensible— to me, first and foremost. “What are you, yourself?” I asked, addressing the subliminal thing. I do not remember the idiot’s chatter. It was a child, eager to be called into play. Come, old woman, you are filled with voices to say anything. My mother is alive, four hundred miles from here. She has dark hair and eyes. First mother. Second mother.

There remains an anguish of familiarity to these lines. In ways that would become vital to the work I would produce over the next ten years, I found here an angle of perception that granted me permission to uncover the birthknot that seemed, then as now, central to the character of the work I needed to do as a poet. Duncan’s exploratory and lyric voicing gave me a way of exploring initial loss, mythologized homeland, inarticulate longing for a lost presence. Companionship formed there, on that median strip of shared loss, shared matter (mater). Reading Duncan in those years I read a way into my own vocation and calling as a poet: How long my mother waited for me, all her life long, like someone waiting at last to see once more a friend or son coming from afar before she dies. No, the second mother, waiting in doubt and in hope for me six months when I

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was hidden. She must have all but disbelieved that a son had been born as she had been told he would be, in the black of Saturn and the sun below the horizon or just rising into the troubled childish day. O now I remember strands of hatred and love, rays of the rotating sun, and how I raged in my puberty reaching up into the woman you were, shaking in the throes of your mothering arms. (Roots and Branches 14)

In large part this book has been a struggle to come to terms with, explore, redefine, and interrogate the various ways poets (male poets, in this case) find a way of going on, of positioning themselves so they can say what they need to say, finding others—comrades-in-arms, confreres, partners—who will share in their projects. For much of my writing life, I have felt isolated from the forms of community this book documents. I started with Duncan and made my way to Blaser, Olson, Creeley, Mackey, et al. partly to better understand my own resistances to the forms of partnering and sociality I found so prominent in these poets. If my critique has been bordered by different conceptions of masculinity and male subjectivity, it has also been asking—implicitly, if not overtly—why do we write as we do? What are the connections between gender and the formal choices we make in our poetry? What would it mean to write differently, against gender’s claims on us? And, perhaps most importantly, this book has repeatedly asked, “What are poems for, culturally, socially, interpersonally? What do they do? What do we do with them? Why do we need them, if we do?” The stakes are high, or negligible, depending on who and where you are. As this book affirms, poetry means what it does, matters when it does, when we take up its cultural work, its visible and complex histories (philosophical, aesthetic, political, ideological), that link us to ancient forms of expression and being in the world. “We need to know how old we are,” Blaser has written. In part, this book has sought to present some of that history, that past through which the contemporary gets read and made part of our daily lives. III The work here began with certain assumptions, certain credos, if you will, about poetry, the connections between poetry and form, form and masculinity, poetry and subjectivity. Of necessity, what I’ve written, traced, charted out here, synoptic, biographical, public and personal at once, has been marked by those earliest elements of thinking through the issues of

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manhood and poesis, masculinity and its variant cultural values—the talk of strangers, intimate and isolated from one another at the same time. LOVE IS FORM Intimacy is the loveliest part of thought (Blaser) No one listens to poetry (Spicer)

This book was written as an address to the former, as interrogation of the latter. One finds a way to form. Any way she/you/he/I/we can. “I think one has to write toward and according to one’s own clarity. This is where absolute rigor is required, genuine rigor beyond the typical deflections/ self-protections of irony” (John Taggart, letter to author, August 11, 2009). Taggart’s words are meaningful as instruction. As pressure on the poems, on their intents and means and outcomes. As discussion in this book has repeatedly pointed out, the connections between form and content, form as content, are reflexive conditions that relate to the poet’s own subjective experience in the world and in language. Between the world and language. For the men I have written about in this book, poetry constitutes many different approaches to the problem. Yet form as credo and possibility, position and stance, requisite dimension of social meaning, remains central to the task. To the underlying cultural work of these writings. “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises / Tougher than anything. / No one listens to poetry.” Which is both statement and appeal, fact and conviction, assertion and plea. Poetry is like the ocean, tougher than we are, a thing unto itself, without need of listeners. Poetry, “humiliating in its disguises,” is tougher than we are, than anything we might become or are. Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry.

Debatable, and all these years later still difficult to parse: No one. Someone listens. But who? Someone out there. You? Are you out there? What are the terms by which any of us can or tries to listen? Michael Davidson notes in

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his comments on this spare—and unsparing—line: In the case of Spicer the question of who is listening becomes a constitutive plank in his poetics. The fact that no one listens to poetry means two things: no one listens to the poetry “we” write but, also, poets consistently fail to listen to the poetry that reaches their ears all the time The first plank pertains to the creation of community—those persons joined by a common willingness to listen to each other; the second pertains to the particular dispensation such a community takes towards communication. The two areas are inextricably linked. Spicer’s poetics is based on the premise that the audience for poetry will, of necessity, be limited, and therein lies its virtue. (ACTS 6 80)

As this book suggests, the formation of that audience—sparse, local, limited geographically and aesthetically—remains a fraught and symbolically resonant site of concern for each of the poets discussed here. Where Williams would suggest in 1923 in a characteristic voicing of late Romantic vocation, “To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination,” Spicer, Duncan, et al. would have us reconfigure what “imagination” means in a context of “no ones.” “Poetry at the gates of existence . . . involved in the composition of the real” (Blaser, “The Practice of Outside”). Gnomic tatters. Which one are you and who would know. Which way would you have come this way. And what’s behind, beside, before. If there are more, why are there more. (Creeley, “Which Way”)

And what is at stake is always that which is left behind, that which comes after. No gloss for future, or for the past. The realisms of self and other, past and present, are inherent in the process. A companionship, sometimes threadbare, yet evident throughout. “If there are more . . . ” Because the personal stake in companionship becomes so great in the way I live, I am sometimes lost when a reader finds me uninteresting or too

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obscure, his interest too soon exhausted to come to any meeting. I am literal about that other reality. It is, I think, the purest storytelling to try to catch that light—and the difficulty of it, the loss of it, is personal. If I see the light, even fragmentarily, and lose it, that too is subject matter, and leads to a kind of heartless poem, for it is not the elegiac which interests me, but the difficulty, the activity of holding on to it. Burning up myself, I would leave the fire behind. (Blaser, The Fire 3)

To which we could add, from Lorca, from his Suites: (Snow stars) There are mountains that want to be water & that conjure up stars over their shoulders (Clouds) And there are mountains that want to have wings & that conjure up clouds, like white clouds. Y hay montañas . . .

IV Acts are what we do. Meaning is made from interpretation of acts. Are there words for this process? Space-shroud and swaddle you wore. transcontinental blood of Indian girl beat of your dream. Fledged by the modern new Archeopteryx, you Hart Crane drank the poison as Crockett a cloud. Tall man’s thirst. I remember your death, reject all answers. Noon, high time, at Orizaba stern you stood. In ecstasy of wake, you who made a bridge leaped. —Olson, “2 Propositions and 3 Proof”

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The poem is marked by gender. Marks on the body of the poet remembered, here, in high lyric praise. It is also a statement about lineage and pathways of public avowal. Of History in the figure of the (male) poet. “I am a poet,” Susan Howe has said. “I know that Charles Olson’s writing encouraged me to be a radical poet. When I was writing my first poems I recall he showed me what to do. Had he been my teacher in real life, I know he would have stopped my voice” (“Dialogue” 166). What does it mean to find—at any point along the way—one’s influences, to let them into the weave and warp of one’s work? What does it mean to learn form through the “voice” of another? Howe asserts here how easily pushed we can be, pulled away, apart, how blockage can occur when we are confronted by another’s powerful presence. The gender narrative here implicit, but hardly simple. Hardly. “I am a daughter not a son. I am a respondent not a panelist. My duty is to respond to papers about a father presented by sons. Are we a Dialogue? Can daughters ever truly respond to factors that come into play in such a patronymic discourse?” (168). An intertwining of voices/vocations that is at once a possibility and threat to her survival as a writer. Howe’s comments speak to the particular condition of a woman writer engaged in, encountering, working through the materials of another (male) figure. This overlay of gender and cultural position has been the subject of this book, albeit from the very different perspective of male writers facing/confronting/partnering with other male writers. I am a son not a daughter. Different stoppages, different threats, different moments of registering the kind of wariness Howe relates. And a different condition of silencing. As male writers, we are not far enough yet from Harold Bloom’s theoretical (and masculinist) model of the anxiety of influence, with its Freudian narrative of parricide as the necessary figurative outcome of the struggle that must occur between ephebe and master. This model of literary lineage still grips our public imagination, even as it subverts other compelling models of agency and interaction, other accounts of our personhood that would run counter to this tale. Formally, the countermodels to this emphasis on the strong, singular Poet rising above all Others are amply documented by the poets and poetries represented in this volume. Think of Duncan’s “derivative” poetics in “Passages,” of Blaser’s incorporative and accretive “Image-Nations,” of Mackey’s cross-cultural gathering of African American and Caribbean lore and mythology in his “Song of the Andoumboulou.” These are poetries and poetics that challenge the borders/ boundaries of conventional cultural categories, of gender ideologies and normative understandings of subjectivity, that seek redress in the interplay of plural investigative forms, plural subjectivities and positions within the broad landscape of social knowledge.

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V Reading my notebook from the1990s again: The trees showing sunlight Sunlight trees, Words ranging forms. Zukofsky, [A-5]

And below this, these lines from Oppen’s The Materials (1962): A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of compensation— —— The lyric valuables— Ends its metaphysic In small lawns of home. There is a singular ego in a lyric, A strange one in war. —— It is the child who is the branch We fall from, where would be bramble —— Difficult to approach the water below the pier

On the facing page, I’d written: I was seeking a way to receive the materials, that composed this [unreadable word] inchoate activities of invisible desire—a longing, unspoken— for salvation, renewal, renascence.

Around this time (I think) I read from the selection of Oppen’s “Working Papers,” edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Sulfur 26), read but didn’t get quite what Oppen was saying. when I was a child, and still when I was 17 or perhaps even 18, I was writing in imitation of poets who had moved me—mostly the English Romantics

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When I discovered contemporary poets—living poets—mostly the midwest poets in my first discovery—a great light dawned—or rather, a great light came to life for me . . . I am always talking about myself Maybe egotism?? or it may be the nature and necessity of poetry Or it may simply be all I know. (“Working Papers” 145)

Which explains much, says so much about what any of us can do, can say, learn in time, one’s own time. That it takes time to understand the work one can and must do. Where belatedness forms a node of consideration in the career of a poet such as Olson, say, it suggests as well how long it takes to absorb what one has read, what one is doing, its meanings, and, yes, its ethics. Recognizing what we want to say which is different from what we must say what we are obligated to say out of necessity. Somehow or other the dream of one beckons two, a dualism. Writing my way back it is the childish wish to be seen linked with other transitional understandings of where I am— this pact, place, I have come to late enough to wonder what took so long? What’s left yet to say . . . Words that identify only this small part of who & where we are in public place and time.

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VI A credo come full circle. One wants to say something. Hear the words coming back, going out again. This singleness you make an evidence has purpose. You are not alone, however one—not so alone. Light finds a place you can see it in such singleness. (Creeley, “Pieces”)

Of which it is also true: One thing done, the rest follows.

The language of these lines informs what any of us might do, might find necessary to do or say. Can reasonably in this time and no other do. Let the lines fall where they must. Cold, when the fire comes the wind will make will the wind the fire higher will the wind be left or the heat too much for the wind and the rain? (Olson, “The Wind After”) As there are days you can’t get through . . . the work can’t get done. “I got up today,” a friend said, “and could feel it behind my eyelids, this pressure, unbearable almost, telling me to stay put, don’t do anything today.”

So much that can’t be said. And requires that we do so. Acknowledgment as witness without egotism or aggrandizement, but humility, patience, clarity.

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Locating ourselves again in “the real in which one wishes to find a place” (Blaser, The Fire 24). “No one listens . . . ” which is also to say some do. As echoes of Mackey’s cante jondo penetrate the stillness of this morning rhythmic rasp stutter and trip of its intricate voice— Came now to a place was more time than place, nonsonant music’s tipped acquittal, long-known place known as By-and-By . . . We lay on our stomachs looking down at the ground. A wall we’d seen dirt sliding down lay to our right. Heard, though there was no sound, a suggestion of sound, nonsonant sought slipped earth contrived. (“Song of the Andoumboulou: 30”)

Heard as incitement, celebration, the will to completion forestalled in ragged contours of line. The language moving us through what Mackey has described in the work of the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris as “displacement and relativizing distance [that] account for the resonances and agitations at work in the text, an animated incompleteness whose components tend toward as well as recede from one another, support as well as destabilize one another” (Discrepant 258). VII To attend again to these recurring folds of meaning, uncertain, unsettled, no certainties but that one traces the edges of person, the boundaries of this

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one and that one, scraped together, pulled apart, again and again: When, suddenly, instead of the world revolving around a person, a person becomes aware that the world is chaotic and impermanent. Anyone she knows or anything she owns can disappear: the world’s surface shimmers like a thin wall of water. The logical way to handle this is to intellectualize, rationalize, and anticipate the events of the world so that there are no surprises: to use language as if it can possibly steady what feels so tenuous and uncertain. But there is nothing certain about language, just as there is nothing certain about where a person goes after he has disappeared. (Prevallet, I, Afterlife)

Which provides this book a kind of coda, inseparable from critique and explanation, as the poem is factual, fanciful, fierce, notational, derisive, playful, conceptual, argumentative, seductive, sublime, feminine masculine folds of thought and feeling that converge in language. A form of conversation held within social space, hearts’ and minds’ work, ongoing acts of serial reflection: Words from before, words from after, they specified into my blank voice the. They said this this, this that, and glut in the wonder of all such singularity became the work. (DuPlessis, “Draft 8: The”) To John Taggart September 24, 2009 (revised 19 February 2010)

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Notes

Introduction 1. By invoking the term “postmodernism” here, I am not interested in rehearsing the lengthy debates, already well-covered elsewhere, concerning this term’s historical exactitude or theoretical efficacy. Rather, I assume both the problematic nature of the term and its usefulness (albeit limited) as one means of identifying and discussing writers whose cultural and aesthetic positions place them in the “post”-modern realm if for no other reason than that they follow modernist writers such as Pound, Williams, and Stein. As Christopher Beach has suggested, “It is clear that to polarize Modernism and postmodernism in any absolute sense is to oversimplify what is a highly complicated pattern of influence, cross-fertilization, self-definition, and differentiation” (28). Also, just as clearly, postmodernism suggests a set of formal characteristics enacted in this poetry discussed here to different degrees and with different consequences for readership and the work’s reception outside the local communities from which it often sprang. 2. The predominance of this form can be witnessed in any number of magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and so on. As Charles Bernstein, Nick Piombino, Marjorie Perloff, and a number of other critics have suggested, the effects of this “official verse culture” on canon formation and the reception of poetry remains pervasive, even as practitioners of “alternative” poetries make inroads into the universities and writing programs that have become functionally the main sites for the writing and dissemination of poetry in this country. 3. Duncan’s abiding notion of “totalities” and the poem as “an event in language” suggests less of this kind of activity than Blaser’s more speculative narrative of the poem as a multiphasic presentation in language. For Mackey, the “word as presence” takes on a more cross-cultural association, as his work is interwoven with Caribbean and African myth, folklore and history, and

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a level of speculative formal play that, as I suggest throughout my discussion here, qualify in important ways the degree to which the word-as-such embodies other totalities, other presences. 4. Perloff has since revised her thinking on lyric and its relation to the formations of modernism, particularly as presented in her chapter from The Dance of the Intellect, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (1985). As she writes in “ ‘Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?’ Revisited” (2002): Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the issue is no longer that of lyric meditation versus encyclopedic collage, most of our best poetry partaking of both in unprecedented ways. The focus today, once we get beyond—as I think we must—sheer subject matter, is less on genre or poetic mode than on the language of poetry, and that makes Eliot and Stein, each in his or her own way, the purveyors of the Flaubertian mot juste, such key figures. As for Duchamp, it was he who first raised an issue that has become central to poetics in the age of Web sites and cyberpoetics. “Can one make,” asked Duchamp, “works which are not works of ‘art?’ ” He posed this question not in a poem or essay or lecture but as a note among notes in the so-called White Box (A l’Infinitif) of 1966. And the paradox is that his own readymades—originally declared by everyone, including the artist himself, to be “not art,” are now among the most proud possessions of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (139)

As Perloff’s remarks suggest, much has changed over the last twenty-five years in our reception of modernism in general and lyric in particular, so that hard separations between different forms of lyric and avant-garde practice are notably absent from contemporary criticism, which tends to be much more invested in issues of gender, sexuality, class, and race as these become manifest in writing from all sectors of the poetic map. If anything, as Perloff makes clear, modernist writers such as Pound, Stevens, and Williams have now become marginal presences in academic circles where the move is made to justify the presence of these writers on syllabi through a careful relocating of their significance: “We are now witnessing the spectacle of Pound or Stevens sessions at MLA that try to justify their very existence by subsuming either poet under the new categories of concern such as Pound and globalization or Stevens in late twentieth-century culture” (138). Embedded in these discussions, however, are the still fraught categories of subjectivity and representation that form key tensions in post-millenial formations of the poetic avant-garde.

One “In Thicket”: Charles Olson, Poetic Career, and the Crisis of Cold War Masculinity I am grateful here for the suggestions and comments of a number of individuals, without whom this chapter in its present form would not have been

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possible: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who read and made substantial comments on an initial draft of this chapter; Paul Naylor, whose helpful remarks on my treatment of the material related directly to the Boldereff-Olson correspondence were central to my recasting of this chapter; Michael Davidson, whose suggestions regarding masculinity in the 1950s were invaluable to my reconsideration of these issues; and Sharon Thesen, for her permission to quote from an unpublished paper, presented at the poetry conference in Orono in 1996, which incisively documents the ways in which Boldereff ’s numerous scholarly and theoretical contributions inform Olson’s early work. 1. My work on this essay has benefited enormously from the publication of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence, edited by Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen. An excerpt from the correspondence was first published as “Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: Who Will Bring It Up, My Lute? The First Letters of the Correspondence,” ed. Ralph Maud and Thesen, Sulfur 31 (Fall 1992): 118–60. 2. More recently, Ralph Maud in Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008) has challenged many of the factual details in Clark’s biography related to the relationship between Olson and Boldereff. Seeking to provide a corrective reading of Olson’s life in what he terms a “reactive biography” (7), Maud diligently reconstructs timelines and review of the correspondence between Olson and Boldereff to provide a more sympathetic context for our understanding of this pivotal relationship in Olson’s life. Maud is careful to underscore the fact that he’s not seeking to undervalue Boldereff ’s importance to Olson’s scholarship and writing. As he suggests, “It is not my purpose to detract from Boldereff ’s contribution but to attempt to be more accurate about certain circumstances than Clark’s methodology allows him to be” (74). That methodology, Maud implies, suffers from both a lack of sympathy on Clark’s part for his subject and faulty assumptions based on mis-readings or misinterpretations of the available correspondence (73). While Maud’s corrective commentary does not change in significant ways the arguments set forth in this chapter, his discussion usefully points up the larger issue of interpretation at stake in biographically based criticism that must rely on documents, letters, and other second-hand evidence in place of direct contact with the figures involved (though this too is hardly a guarantee of truthfulness, insofar as such contact also entails its own forms of privileging and discrepant disclosure). What one gets, then, is never an altogether authoritative account (Clark + Maud = The Whole Truth), but the interweave of documentary evidence, life events, and interpretive resituating of these into something recognizably real and valid. Thus, Maud’s assertion that “we will not get anything like a complete picture of this Connie-Charles-Frances love

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4.

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triangle until Charles’s letters to Connie are published” (77) still leaves open the question of how, in what ways, scholar-critics might use such information, what conclusions we may draw, what narratives we might construct from documents that passed through the mail once, were read in real time, mulled over, reconsidered, and finally reacted to. In such ways, it’s clear that in place of some cohesive narrative we always have instead the splintered, disrupted, nonlinear pieces of life histories that are not assimilable to any single account. Finally, whether one takes the approach that Olson was the more culpable party here or a man enmeshed in a complex love triangle and doing his best under the circumstances or some combination of the two, what is clear from the correspondence and the poems that Olson wrote during this period is that Boldereff asserted enormous intellectual power in the relation she shared with Olson. As I argue here, that collaboration, if you will, that fecund shared space between Olson and Boldereff, suggests a great deal not only about Olson, but about a particular kind of appropriation, knowledge-gathering, and literary partnering, the roots of which extend deep into the heart of masculinist culture. In this regard, I will be taking a somewhat different position here from Libbie Rifkin, who argues that “gender and sexual anxieties are entangled in their self-fashioning rhetoric, but they do not undergird it” (46). In fact, as my discussion suggests, the level of “entanglement” expressed in letters to both Creeley and Boldereff suggests that gender, if not “undergirding” Olson’s language, provides the richly coded subtext of a struggle for power and mastery that is, at its root, gender-based. Jed Rasula’s The America Poetry Wax Museum remains the most lucid account to date of the ways in which intellectual conservatism, cultural indifference, and academic institutional forces had an impact on the writing, circulation, and marginalization of poetry in the contemporary era. For a related discussion of U.S. poetry and the cultural mindset of the 1950s, see Marjorie Perloff’s “Poetry 1956: A Step Away from Them,” Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998: 83–115. A related motive for Olson’s omission would seem to be his desire to protect both Connie and Frances from the kind of exposure that more public declarations would involve. It’s beyond the scope of this chapter to speculate beyond than what’s evident from the letters, but it’s fair to say that the preservation of this “secret” earns a good deal of poetic capital for Olson, allowing him to preserve ties to both women, in the domestic and intellectual spheres, while alleging an independence that his own work with Boldereff belies. This phrase, which since its first appearance in Olson’s essay has become part of the stock vocabulary of contemporary North American poetry, has

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most recently been parodied by Charles Bernstein as “ONE PERCEPTION MUST NEVER LEAD DIRECTLY TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION” (“Introjective Verse”).

Two “Homosexual Advertising”: Gay Subjectivity, Modernist Form, and Robert Duncan’s The Venice Poem 1. Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), with its iconographic reinscription of gay politics through the figure of Harvey Milk, suggests some of the distance that’s been covered, culturally speaking, between the publication of Duncan’s essay in 1944, Milk’s assassination more than thirty years later, and our own postmillennial time period. Yet, as the continuing nationwide occurrences of bias crimes against members of the LGBT community and the prominence of the Evangelical right’s gay-bashing rhetoric suggest, Duncan’s argument for a humanist recognition of queer identities has hardly lapsed in its importance or relevance. If anything, Duncan’s essay remains a sober reminder of how deeply entrenched hostility to sexualities perceived as threatening or transgressive remains. 2. Here, as elsewhere, I am indebted to Faas’s Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual for information regarding Duncan’s life circumstances at the time. His narration of events remains the fullest account we have to date of these early years, and the most measured in its consideration of the numerous factors that constellated around this period of personal and poetic development. 3. Throughout my discussion, I refer to the publication of The Venice Poem included in The First Decade: Selected Poems 1940–1950. “A Description of Venice” first appeared in Berkeley Miscellany 1 (Summer 1948), while the first book publication of the poem was in Poems 1948–49. 4. As Kevin Killian has pointed out to me, Shakespeare’s Venice as it exists in The Merchant of Venice and Othello would certainly have been familiar to gay readers of the late 1940s as a site of intensified, if somewhat closeted, male sexuality. Mann’s “Death in Venice” provides another model of the city as one of heightened, covert activity, one that likewise had a great deal of currency in the gay community of the 1950s. Of a later date, but interesting as datum, is the Olivier/Richardson production of Othello in 1955 at the Old Vic in London, in which Iago is portrayed as being in love with Othello. 5. Another element of meaning here lies in what Robert K. Martin in The Homosexual Tradition (1998) identifies as aspects of the Platonic tradition within gay culture. According to Martin, gay writers have learned (from Whitman among others) to encode their sexuality through a complex shifting of emphases on a “feigned” heterosexuality, along with the subtle and

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not-so-subtle subversion of meaning through euphemism, obliquity, and the replacement of male pronominal identifiers with female ones. This kind of masking was endemic to gay writing pre-1950 and remains a distinctly painful reminder of the ways in which homosexuality in the United States has so often been obscured by textual moves that are not so far removed from contemporary poetics as we might like to think. As Maria Damon has suggested in The Dark End of the Street (1993) in a passage that has striking parallels to Duncan’s Venice Poem, the problem with such a reading is that “gayness becomes the privileged, hidden truth/depth, feigned heterosexuality, the debased appearance/surface. The victim, identified with the hidden/ privileged, becomes the god who awaits interpretive understanding by a few or the maiden rescuable only by the brave hermeneut” (146). 6. This line is Samuel Johnson’s and is quoted in one of Duncan’s notebooks from the period.

Three In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and the Poetics of (Mis)Translation 1. I am especially grateful here to Kevin Killian for providing information about Blaser’s relationships with Felts and Persky, and the rift that emerged between Duncan and Blaser as a result. 2. It is useful to consider the following from Duncan’s late essay, “The Self in Postmodern Poetry” (1983): “The play of first person, second person, third person, of masculine and feminine and neuter, the ‘it’ that plays a major role in recent work, is noticeably active in the multiphasic proposition of voice in my poetry, where impersonations, personifications, transpersonations and depersonations, again from the earliest levels of development in my language are always at play” (Fictive 220). 3. See Davidson’s The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century for a comprehensive discussion of the San Francisco poetry communities during this period. For an insightful reading of the events that transpired at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, particularly in terms of Charles Olson’s involvement, see Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves, which contains a chapter devoted to this subject. 4. Duncan’s translations of “El Desdichado,” and the other sonnets in the series, were republished in Bending the Bow with only slight changes in the text. In this poem, Duncan replaced “thou” in the fifth line with “you.” 5. I am indebted here and throughout my discussion to Norma Rinsler’s useful account of Les Chimères in her edition of Nerval’s sonnets. 6. Rinsler comments: “Amour is the god Eros, brother of Antéros, the lover in darkness betrayed by Psyche. Phébus is Apollo, the god of light, of divination and of poetry. Lusignan was a mediaeval lord who married the fairy Mélusine

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and lost her because he did not trust her (as Psyche lost Eros because she did not trust him). Biron is the gay figure of legend and son to whom Nerval refers in the Chansons et Légendes du Valois. He is also the poet Byron” (123). 7. Lansing’s comments on Duncan’s and Blaser’s translations are noteworthy for their contemporaneous appearance. While Lansing is arguably balanced in his assessment of both poets’ efforts (for the most part he bypasses the vitriolic intensity of Duncan’s comments in Audit), he usefully points up the way in which Duncan’s etymologically based translation procedure is at odds with Blaser’s attempt to meet the “musical force and numinosity of the original” (87). 8. Duncan makes reference to and quotes from this letter throughout his commentary in Audit. Both letters quoted by Duncan are in the Blaser archives at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 9. This afterword has been omitted from both the Coach House Press (1993) and University of California Press (2006) editions of The Holy Forest, which is unfortunate as it provides a useful indication of Blaser’s thinking-through of this work circa 1964–65. Also revealing is Blaser’s titling this section of The Holy Forest as “Versions of Gérard de Nerval,” a notable shift from their initial appearance under the heading “translations.”

Four Recovering the Public World: Robin Blaser, Hannah Arendt, and the Discourses of Self and Other in Image-Nations 1–12 1. I am indebted throughout my discussion here to several individuals. In particular, I would like to acknowledge and thank Robin Blaser for his generosity in answering a number of questions related to the work discussed here. I would also like to thank Miriam Nichols, whose discussion in letters to me of the particular meanings of “social” and “public” as applied to Blaser’s work did much to improve the clarity of my own readings of Blaser’s use of those terms. Finally, I want to acknowledge the contributions of the late Barry Cox, who read and commented on an earlier version of this essay and whose providing of key and (at the time of this chapter’s original writing) hard-to-find essays by Blaser came at a crucial moment in the writing. 2. Throughout my discussion here, I have relied on the Coach House Press edition (1993) of The Holy Forest. The University of California Press edition is an invaluable resource as well, with additional poems that postdate the earlier volume’s publication. 3. Personal correspondence with author, August 22, 1996. 4. For a lucid account of Arendt’s thinking as it relates to these two key terms, see Canovan, especially pp. 110–22. Of particular importance to my discussion

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5.

6.

7.

8.

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here is Canovan’s observation that the public holds such preeminent status in Arendt’s work because “it is only in the public realm that reality discloses itself” (111). I am grateful to Miriam Nichols for bringing this passage to my attention. Blaser’s hostility to the essentializing discourses of humanism, those “closures of our thought of reality,” is articulated in the sternest terms, and provides the real force behind his critique of poetries that fail to venture past the gates of received cultural knowledge. For Blaser, emphasis on the multiple and interconnected suggests a resolute rejection of the “version of humanism that collapses into itself, worldless, and leaves the large numbers of people who define it moiling” (Blaser, “Recovery” 19). As is evident from even a cursory reading of Blaser’s poems, they are built through overlapping motifs of allusion and textual citation, gathering sources into the processive measures of the poem’s thought. While this collaging of multiple discourses and sources (of the found, the chance-discovered or trouvés ) remains a signal strategy of modernist writing from Pound onward, Blaser’s handling of materials suggests a more relational and potentially less coercive intent than that of Pound, Eliot, and so on. Rather than the imposition of a cultural knowledge base (as in The Cantos or even The Maximus Poems), Blaser alternatively offers an “opening up” of the terms by which we acquire meaning and knowledge of the world. Opposing systematic argument in favor of elision, obliquity, and suggestiveness, the discontinuous (but not haphazard) arrangement of materials in Blaser’s poems is very much what they are about, their meanings. In this way, they smudge the traditional equation of form and content as described by Creeley (“Form is never more than an extension of content”) to arrive at form that is content and vice versa. For a full account of this exchange between Blaser and Olson, as well as other matters related to their early friendship, see “Charles Olson to Robin Blaser, Part I: Robin Blaser in Massachusetts—with an introduction to the letters by Robin Blaser,” Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #8 (June 1995), ed. Ralph Maud. Duncan’s best-known Vietnam War poem, “Passages 25: Uprising,” which appears in his 1968 volume Bending the Bow, provides a provocative counterexample of how sociopolitical content may be brought to bear on poetic discourse. While Duncan’s poem is clearly the more outraged and politically vocal text (in terms of its content), it suggests the limits of a kind of writing that would subsume the current and topical into a poetic language of contemporaneous reference. Inasmuch as Blaser’s poem is “about” the destruction of North Vietnamese human life and culture, it remains situated in a Mallarméan ethos of absent presence, in which the potentially

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overwhelming historical realities of the present-day are folded into overlapping layers of reality that afford the poem its propositional and ambiguous address.

Five

“Collapsed Aura”: Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and the Poetics of Discrepant Subjectivity in “Song of the Andoumboulou”

1. Outside the scope of this essay, but important to note here is the palimpsested nature of Mackey’s affiliation with Duncan. If the older poet exerted especial influence, especially in the early stages of Mackey’s career, H.D. became a key alternate figure in a complicated transmission of influence and literary tradition. As Mackey suggests in his essay “Palimpestic Stagger,” it was in 1965 while he was browsing in a bookstore that he came across both Duncan’s Roots and Branches (1964; which contains the long “Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s 73rd Birthday”) and H.D.’s Helen in Egypt. In describing his experience of reading Duncan’s “The Continent” for the first time, a poem that makes conscious allusion to H.D., Mackey suggests that “among the elements I was caught by, caught up in . . . was the straight-out metaphysical wont of the first three lines, [their] annunciative assurance whose willingness to advance vatic risk shows that it sees itself to be such” (4). In effect, Mackey’s reading of Duncan created another position, one that melded Duncan and H.D. as composite (yet distinct) figures of literary tradition and poetic vocation, suggesting a textual realm that “usher[ed] rhetorical swell into a rhythmic retreat into fractal subsidence, subtended ends of a tidalectical swing between annunciative ebb and annunciative flow” (ibid.). Mackey’s absorption of both writers into his own poetic practice suggests a dialogic response to the quandary of literary influence, especially as developed across gender lines. While outside the scope of this chapter, Mackey’s use of H.D. via Duncan suggests another model of literary influence, in which the female poet’s work is transmitted through the work of another male writer. Such readings, which invite misreadings, become vital when considering the work of male poets whose constructions of a literary past may rely on a set of female influences acknowledged primarily in the attraction they provide to the male writer’s work. 2. For the best discussion to date on the marginalization of an entire range of American poetries, and for a cogent analysis of canon formation both within and outside the academy, see Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum (1996). 3. While this issue is generally outside the parameters of my discussion, Mackey’s work attests to the continuing preeminence accorded orality and

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the nonwritten in a good deal of African American writing. As Aldon Nielsen has suggested, this move is often accompanied by a racially coded valorization of the vocal at the expense of a more complicated and complex understanding of the interchange between the written and the nonwritten that has especial provenance in work by more experimental African American writers. Specifically, in the case of William Melvin Kelly (Dunfords Travels Everywheres) and Norman Pritchard (EECCHHOOEESS), formal play and typographic inventiveness have been labeled inauthentic by a critical establishment still disposed to viewing work by African Americans as marked by “organic presence” and vocality: “One key component of the critical operations that have ‘deaccessioned’ (to use a term depressingly current in the language of the library and the gallery) broad swaths of the recent past of black experiment in poetics is a series of nearly hegemonic assumptions about the nature of the relationship between African-American oral traditions and writing, with a clear privilege given to the prevailing ideal of the oral” (Nielsen 18). 4. This comment needs to be somewhat qualified, since in the prose works Bedouin Hornbook (1986) and Djbot Bahghostus’s Run (1993) Mackey traverses a number of emotive planes at once, as he assumes the role of griot and serviteur as provisional sites of cultural loss and linguistic orphaning. 5. While I will be discussing Mackey primarily as a poet, any fuller analysis of his career would have to take into account the complete range of his endeavors as a critic (author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, CrossCulturality and Experimental Writing [1993], which includes seminal work on Duncan, Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, et al., and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews.[2005]; editor of Hambone, a major repository of culturally ambitious, alternative writing; fiction writer (several volumes of epistolary fiction, including Bedouin Hornbook [1986] and Djbot Bahgostus’s Run [1993]; and tenured professor [at the University of California-Santa-Cruz]). The overlap and intersection of these various roles bear noting, as they suggest a model of the poet as fully engaged (and institutionally situated) culture-worker. This model has clear consequences for the poetic writing that gets done, and stands in stark contrast to the choices made by poets like Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, whose hostility to the academy remained lifelong, even as their work necessarily coincided with anthologies and inclusion in courses in contemporary poetry and poetics that brought their poetry well within the walls of academe. 6. This move to both forefront the female as a Muse/Goddess figure and marginalize her activity in a not-so-subtle “silencing” is perhaps not entirely

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surprising, given the masculinist ethos of some of the cultural materials Mackey’s poetry intersects. At the same time, a more sympathetic reading of the figuring of gender here and elsewhere in Mackey’s work would suggest a positioning of the female as related in key ways to the exilic male figure who wanders through these poems as well. Rather than reproducing cultural gender norms, Mackey suggests a careful foregrounding of notions of subjectivity—sexual, ethnographic, gendered—that is neither as fixed nor as stable as we might like to think. It is in this space of transiency and mutability that Mackey situates a reading of male and female, masculine and feminine, that remains ideologically and intellectually speculative, and narratively reflexive. 7. In the African American artwork, this problem is revivified in the culturally dominant insistence on linearity versus discursiveness, on direct feeling versus intellection. Moreover, such insistence tends to foreclose more complex, mediated representations of racial and ethnic identity, insisting instead on essentialized versions of the self and the culture that defines it. Thus, for instance, Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred has occupied a somewhat marginal place in American poetry, while the more accessible and covertly simple “Brass Spittoons” or “Theme for English B” have become standard inclusions in poetry anthologies. While a number of other reasons account for this situation as well (e.g., the preference of anthology editors for short, manageable poems, as opposed to longer, serial works that disrupt conventional expectations of reading and writing), it’s clear that in the contemporary context poems by members of identity-related groupings (whether women, Hispanic, African American, or Asian American) depend on a high level of “absorptive artifice,” to borrow from Charles Bernstein, to become successful as representative statements of culturally visible personhood. As Mackey’s own writing career suggests, forming a critical space for alternative discourses of subjectivity and cultural identity remains the critical task for a revisionist poetics. 8. By “conventional reading practices,” I have in mind the set of expectations often oriented around poetic utterance as, on the one hand, cathartic expression or, on the other, organic “witness.” Either way, this model of the relationship between reader and text and text and writer suggests an oppressive linearity, one that Mackey has no interest in corroborating. The cathartic and organic may find a level of coherence in his poetry, as do the vatic and exhortative, but they are never taken to be sufficient unto themselves, to be anything other than furtive under-layers of cultural voicing. 9. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s figuring of the “phantom” as this relates to intrapsychic ghosting has resonant applications to Mackey’s work, which is similarly invested in a vocabulary of ghostliness and haunting. The

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cross-generational consequences of phantomic loss on the individual are irrefutable: “The buried speech of the parent will be (a) dead (gap) without a burial place in the child. This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire family line” (140).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 9, 12 Allen, Donald, 27 Anania, Michael, co-editor of Audit, 104 Arendt, Hannah first preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, 133 formations of the “social” and “public,” 133–5 relationship between visibility of the image and public, 146–7 role in dispute between Duncan and Blaser, 131–2 Artaud, Antonin, letter to George Le Breton regarding Les Chimères, 120–2 Berkeley Poetry Conference, end of an era, 109–10 Bernstein, Charles, 10 Bernstein, Michael André, 8–9, 78, interview with Duncan, 83 Blaser, Robin, 11, 21–2 “The Fire,” 145 “Image-Nation 1 “the fold,” 140 “Particles,” 138, 146 particularity of the image, relation to Arendt’s notion of politics, 146–7 “Poetry and Positivism,” 143 “Recovery of the Public World,” 136

response to Duncan over Nerval in “The Fire,” 123–4 seriality of Image-Nations, 151–2 “Stadium of the Mirror,” 132, 138 Boldereff, Frances, 28–31 initial version of “Projective Verse,” 37–40 response to Olson’s “The Prayer,” 59 “For Sappho, Back”, incestuous relation to Olson, 57–8 Boone, Bruce, 20 Butler, Judith, 17–18 de Certeau, Michel, 131–2 Clark, Tom, 33, 48–9 Clifford, James, 183–4 Conte, Joseph, 15 Corber, Robert, postwar masculinity, 33 Creeley, Robert “Conversion to Her,” 15–16 Olson correspondence, 28–30 Cuordileone, K.A., Cold War politics, 6–7, 49–50 Damon, Maria, 19, 47–8 Davidson, Michael, 6–7, 33–4 Donahue, Joseph, 167 Doria, Charles, co-editor of Audit, 104 Duncan, Robert alternate versions of The Venice Poem, 96

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Duncan, Robert—Continued Audit commentary on Nerval translations, 104 debt to Eliot, 80–1 Groundwork, 1–2 “Homosexual in Society,” 66–9 notion of translation of Nerval as “going to war,” 125–6 poet as god-like figure, 89–90 Pound’s response to The Venice Poem, 78–9 The Venice Poem, 66–7 visit to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, 71–2 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Creeley and women, 16–17 ethics of serial poem, 152 “Manhood,” 34–5 serial poem as response to Vietnam War, 60’s era protest, 154 Eliot, T.S., “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” 80–1 Epstein, Andrew, 5–6 Faas, Ekbert, discussion of Duncan’s visit to Pound, 71–2 Golding, Alan, 36–7 Goodman, Paul, 50–2 Griaule, Marcel, 159 Gunn, Thom, 88 Harper, Michael, introduction to Eroding Witness, 162 Harrison, Jane, 37–9 Hatlen, Burton, interview with Duncan, 83 see also Bernstein, Michael André Jeffreys, Mark, 12–14 Kalaidjian, Walter, Languages of Liberation, 26–7 Keenaghan, Eric, 6–7

Kimmel, Michael, 49 Kostenbaum, Wayne, 4–5 Lansing, Gerrit, on Blaser’s translations of Nerval, 114 Lipking, Lawrence, 25–6 Lowell, Amy, 42–3 Mackey, Nathaniel, 10–11, 22–3 affiliation with Duncan, 163, 168, 170–2 cante jondo, 160, 166 experimental work by African-American writers, 178–80 formations of cultural subjectivity, see Clifford, James postmodern lyric, 163–4 role of authenticity in poetry, 181 use of term “discrepant engagement,” 161–2 May, Larry, 52–3 Nerval, Gérard de “El Desdichado,” 112–13 Les Chimères first publication of, 110–11 use of image, 122–3 New York School, 5 Nichols, Miriam, “Three for Public,” 137 Olson, Charles “La Chute”, early version of, 54–5 “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” 61–4, 86–7 developing sense of masculinity, 33–5 early relationship with Duncan, 44–5 Human Universe, 9–10 masculine model of poetic form, 54 meeting Duncan, 31–2 “The Prayer,” 58–9 “Projective Verse” initial publication, 35–6 reaction to Paul Goodman, 50–2

Index response to homosexuality in Duncan’s poetry, 48 “For Sappho, Back,” 56–8 “third sex,” 51 Perloff, Marjorie initial publication of “Projective Verse,” 36–7 Mackey and lyric, 163–4 see also Mackey, Nathaniel Pound, Ezra “A Canto for,” 72–5 Duncan’s and Blaser’s responses to legacy of, 105–6 response to The Venice Poem, 78–9 Ransom, John Crowe, reaction to “Homosexual in Society,” 66, 70 Rasula, Jed, 36

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Rifkin, Libbie, 7, 27–30 Schwartz, Leonard, 10 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 18–19 Silliman, Ron, 12 Spicer, Jack, 5 letter to Pound, 75–7 theory of translation, 102–3 Strikwerda, Robert, 52–3 Thesen, Sharon, on Boldereff ’s intellectual contribution to Olson, 30 Venuti, Lawrence, modernist translation practice, 106 Vincent, John Emi, 7–8 Williams, William Carlos, collage form, 79–80

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