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Overview
In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.
In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.
While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2015 |
| Series: | Modern and Contemporary Poetics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Intricate Thicket
Reading Late Modernist Poetries
By Mark Scroggins
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 the University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8806-5
CHAPTER 1
Coming Down from Black Mountain
Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley
Five and a half decades ago, as the summer of 1957 wore into fall, the poet Charles Olson — who stood six foot six in his stockings, who had been in his day a champion high school orator, John F. Kennedy's freshman writing instructor at Harvard, the discoverer of Melville's marginalia, an organizer on FDR's 1944 reelection campaign, and an amateur archaeologist in the Yucatán, and who was now the rector of tiny Black Mountain College in the western wilds of North Carolina — locked the college's doors for the last time and handed the keys to its new owners. Classes having ended in late 1956, Olson had been selling the campus off piecemeal, building by building, field by field. Now the final assets had been liquidated, and Black Mountain was no more.
Opinions would differ on Olson's few years at the helm of Black Mountain: some would argue that he had driven the college — always on shaky financial ground — over the edge into bankruptcy, while others insisted that he'd done the best he could with an untenable situation, and managed to produce a remarkable efflorescence of art and writing on a very frayed shoestring.
Established in 1933 by the Classicist John Andrew Rice, Black Mountain had always put the arts at the heart of its curriculum, and under the direction of the Bauhaus veteran Josef Albers, it had become a center of experimentation like no other. There were no set curricula or courses of study: the students designed their own education, and students and faculty lived in a communal setting that over the years fostered numerous collaborative endeavors. The artists and musicians who served on the faculty, or who visited for the summer sessions, represent a cross-section of creative thought in mid-century America: Albers and his wife, the fabric artist Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, David Tudor, Stefan Wolpe, the photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. And many of the students who worked with them went on to become at least as famous: Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, and Cy Twombly are only the best known. Buckminster Fuller raised his first geodesic dome at Black Mountain; John Cage staged his first multimedia "happening" there.
While Olson was a trained dancer and had well-developed interests in contemporary music and visual art, one of the effects of his rectorship was to turn the college into a free-form writing workshop, a hive of literary activity that gave rise to the so-called Black Mountain poets. Previously, Black Mountain had been known for its visual arts teaching. In its waning days, as most of its artists and musicians were packing their bags, Olson called in his poet friends Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan to teach the dwindling student body. Their teaching styles could not have been more different, and were emblematic of the differences in their poetry. Olson himself would lecture in bravura four- or five-hour sessions, the classroom's air growing blue and acrid with the smoke from his cigarettes, its chalkboards overflowing with names, dates, quotations, and diagrams; it was an endless, authoritarian, oceanic monologue. The shy Creeley, who sometimes had to be physically forced into the classroom, would read aloud, talk about poets he loved — William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane — and discuss the jazz musicians whose works had so influenced his own.
Duncan's seminars were exercises in the most basic building blocks of poetry: they began with vowel sounds, then moved on to consonants and whole syllables (eventually, one assumes, they arrived at lines and stanzas). Like Albers, Duncan saw himself as exploring the foundational materials of his art. Given that he usually began his seminars at 8 A.M. and that Olson's lectures often ran past midnight, their students must have been seriously sleep deprived.
Literary historians love "movements": the Imagists, the Symbolists, the Objectivists, the Language poets. Movements — along with schools and groups — are like file folders: they give scholars a pigeonhole in which to stow poets, allowing future generations to pluck out the major ones — "See, he never fit into that category in the first place!" — while leaving the minor ones to gather dust. It's true that Olson and Creeley influenced each other profoundly, and that Duncan looked to both of them as "fire-sources" of the contemporary. The three dropped each others' names frequently in print and conversation, and to some degree logrolled for each other. But what really got people thinking of them — along with their students Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, John Wieners, Michael Rumaker, and Fielding Dawson, and a penumbral crowd of others who'd never set foot at Black Mountain, including Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, Cid Corman, and Paul Blackburn — as a movement was Donald Allen's 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960.
The New American Poetry was the countercultural backpacker's volume of choice for at least two decades, a veritable scripture of hipsterdom: a well-thumbed copy of the anthology, with its familiar cover of flag-evoking red and white stripes, was to the young person of the 1960s, weary of the polished, formal ironies of Richard Wilbur and the Boston Brahmin angst of Robert Lowell, what a copy of Atlas Shrugged was to the adolescent neoconservative of the 1980s.
Critics have carped at Allen's selections for a half-century now — such is the fate of the anthologist. Allen, an editor at Grove Press with a good eye for what was up-and-coming in poetry, did his best to make sense of a vast sea of poetry that was largely invisible to the readers of the literary journals of the 1950s, and that had entirely failed to register with the editors (Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson) of New Poets of England and America three years before. Rather than present his unfamiliar poets alphabetically or by date of birth, he sorted them by geography and aesthetic school. The results are almost too well known to bear repeating: Beat poets, New York School poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, and — leading off the book, with Olson at their head — the Black Mountain poets.
The New American Poetry is, in fact, a rather Olson-centric affair: not only does he lead off the book, but also Allen gives him more space than any of his forty-three other poets. And the first of the prose manifestos appended to the end of the anthology is by Olson as well. "Projective Verse," as the essay is titled, was first published in Poetry New York in 1950, the year before Olson went down to North Carolina. If there is a single theoretical text central to the Black Mountain poets, this is it. "Projective Verse" is one of those turning-point documents in poetics, like Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, Mallarmé's "Crise de vers," or Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." Olson wrote it, of course, for the usual reason: to defend and explain his own work. It argues for what Olson called "composition by field," as opposed to "closed" verse, which is to say the formal poetry fostered by New Criticism. But "Projective Verse" is more than just another manifesto on behalf of free verse. Rather, it advocates a principle of movement. The poem, according to Olson, is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but rather a "high energy-construct [sic] and, at all points, an energy discharge." As such, it is not an artifact, not a well-wrought urn, but a process.
In Olson's earlier work, "projectivism" operates largely at the level of syntax. "The Kingfishers" (1949), a mid-length poem that opens The New American Poetry, makes itself a "high energy-construct" by means of its hailstorm of quotation (Rimbaud, Chairman Mao, Plutarch, Francis Parkman on Cortez and the Aztecs, Norbert Wiener on cybernetics) and speculation. Nevertheless, it also makes a rather clear and coherent assertion: the West has reached a cultural and spiritual dead-end, and we must look for new sources of vitality, whether in the Chairman's East or the cultural traces of prehistoric eras.
Much of what makes Olson's poetry so exciting — and, at times, so frustrating — can be seen in the first lines of the poem's second section:
I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
la lumiere"
but the kingfisher
de l'aurore"
but the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
he got the color of his breast
from the heat of the setting sun!
First, and most obviously, there's good old-fashioned modernist allusiveness here, in this case to Plutarch's essay "On the E at Delphi," to a 1948 speech of Mao (as related to Olson by a French correspondent), and to a folktale about the kingfisher and Noah's ark. Olson cross-cuts his sources, so that Mao's words intersect with the kingfisher story. That the poem was composed in the age of the typewriter is evident from the spacing of its lines, achieved by tab-stop. ("It is the advantage of the typewriter," Olson writes in "Projective Verse," "that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends" [OP 245].) And those closing but unopened quotation marks? Like Olson's unclosed parentheses, they're part and parcel of his idiom, of a stammering lyricism in which the syntax constantly stumbles over itself and changes course. "Get on with it," he urges in "Projective Verse," "keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen" (OP 240).
Pound is of course on Olson's mind (in the late forties he had regularly visited the poet at St. Elizabeths), and if he doesn't entirely commit himself to Pound's collagist method, he emulates Pound in adopting a moral stance:
But I have my kin, if for no other reason than
(as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,
given my freedom, I'd be a cad
if I didn't. Which is most true. (CO 92)
There are lessons to be learned from the fall of the Mesoamerican empires and the cessation of the Kampuchean trade in kingfisher feathers, and these, Olson is convinced, are of great value to the West in 1949. "I pose you your question," he ends the poem. "Shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? // I hunt among stones" (CO 93).
Those "stones" — think "stony rubbish," handfuls of dust, fragments shored against ruins — should alert us to the poem's most important antecedent. For "The Kingfishers" is, of course — like Crane's The Bridge, Williams's Spring and All, and Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle — a response to The Waste Land. In 1922, readers could take The Waste Land as a formally innovative expression of the impasse Western culture had reached with the Great War. By 1949, however, Eliot looked like the archbishop of an all-too-familiar aesthetic and social conformity. Rimbaud had grown up — as Rimbauds are too apt to do — into Matthew Arnold. The cure for what ails the West, "The Kingfishers" suggests, can be found not by evoking the wisdom of an Anglo-Catholic "thunder," but by digging down to the deepest sources of Western thought.
Everything you might possibly want to know about "The Kingfishers" — the circumstances of its composition, its evolution through various drafts, the sources of its allusions — can be found in Ralph Maud's exhaustive What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers." There's nothing unusual about this kind of study (how many books have been published on The Waste Land?), but there's a touch of the obsessive in Maud's systematic hunting-down of Olson's sources. The whole book, it would seem, is designed to set straight the "errancies" in Guy Davenport's 1974 article "Scholia and Conjectures for Olson's 'The Kingfishers.'" Maud's pedantry is even more evident in his most recent venture into Olsoniana, Charles Olson at the Harbor, subtitled A Biography. "This is a reactive biography" are Maud's first words. What he reacts against is Tom Clark's 1990 Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, a book so flawed, in Maud's view, that "my complaints can now with honor be put into a book-length format where, having grown from righteous nitpicking through glorious indignation, they can be a castle of perseverence against the spread of Clark's misinformation." Maud cites Boswell's desire to correct the errors of Sir John Hawkins's and Mrs. Piozzi's lives of Johnson; but Boswell was never so Miltonic in his rhetoric.
Clark's biography, while solid in certain ways, reeks of disillusioned discipleship, most evidently in his relentless negative psychologizing and his tendency to put the worst possible spin on Olson's every action. But Clark's shortcomings hardly justify the existence of Charles Olson at the Harbor. Far better is Maud's earlier Charles Olson's Reading, also subtitled A Biography. Olson was nothing if not bookish, and Maud's year-by-year tracing of the books Olson read, bought, and borrowed amounts to a unique record of a life lived largely among books.
Olson had been trained as a scholar at Harvard and Wesleyan, but he brought to his scholarship a passion and intensity not often found among the library-carrel crowd. Rarest of all was his synthesizing vision, his ability to step outside the normal paths of the critic and literary historian. In Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville that rode the crest of the Melville revival of the 1930s, Olson demonstrated not only how Melville's reading of Shakespeare's tragedies shaped Moby-Dick but also the complex dependence of his imagination on the whaling industry and on America's spatial imagination of itself.
Olson certainly believed in the value of research. It was by dint of sheer tenacious spadework that he discovered the remnants of Melville's personal library, and through hard reading of Melville's marginalia that he discovered the extent of the links between King Lear and Moby-Dick. In A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (based on a letter he wrote to Dorn when he was a student at Black Mountain), he stresses the value of "PRIMARY DOCUMENTS":
And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it.
And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you're in, forever. (OP 306–07)
Many of Olson's shorter poems evince, if not "a lifetime of assiduity," at least some hard and concentrated reading. "There Was a Youth Whose Name Was Thomas Granger" (1946 or 1947) recounts, from trial transcripts and historical narrative, a grim incident of bestiality in colonial New England (CO 43–45). "Anecdotes of the Late War" (1955, CO 334–40) is a breathless, narrative-sprinkled analysis of the relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War. Parts of it read, as do many of Olson's poems, like transcriptions of a graduate seminar. He was always a teacher at heart.
But Olson's own "saturation job," which is to say his major subject, was his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village to which he retreated after Black Mountain dissolved and where he based himself for the rest of his life. Just as Williams took Paterson, New Jersey, as the kernel for his long poem, Olson initially addressed his Maximus Poems, the vast project he began in 1950 and worked on until his death in 1970, to Gloucester. More specifically, the first poems are addressed to Gloucester native Vincent Ferrini, who had solicited Olson for his new literary magazine.
The first poem, "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You," opens with one of the bravura passages in American letters:
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Intricate Thicket by Mark Scroggins. Copyright © 2015 the University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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