Of course, The Dream Songs is not without its critics, particularly with respect to the race issue. A blurb from Bruce Bawer, over at Modern American Poetry, I think sums it up best:

...And then there’s what one may call the race question. Henry, in Berryman’s own words, is "sometimes in blackface," which is to say that at times his chatter has a minstrel-show flavor. Why? Perhaps because, having made the Atlantic crossing with Anne Bradstreet and discovering himself not to be a pseudo-Englishman like Eliot but an American poet like Whitman and Pound, the ever-alienated Berryman found it appropriate, upon starting on The Dream Songs, to identify his alter ego with the most isolated segment of American society, namely the black subculture. But minstrel-show talk? It is no surprise that Berryman has been accused by some critics of racial insensitivity, and one wouldn’t want to have to defend him from the charge. But this insensitivity, if such it is, is only part of a larger problem with The Dream Songs: namely, that Berryman is almost invariably so engulfed in his own emotion that the feelings of other people – black or white, male or female, poet or non-poet – don’t even enter into the picture. The songs teem with evidence to support the judgment of Allen Tate – one of the poet’s closest friends – that Berryman "never grew up"; and anyone forced to read The Dream Songs from cover to cover can well understand Jeffrey Myers’s complaint in his book Manic Power that they "are simply paranoid prjections of childhood manias and obsessions."

From Bruce Bawer, "The Poetry of John Berryman" The New Criterion 8:4 (December 1989), 25.

Consisting of the original, Pulitzer Prize winning, 77 Dream Songs published in 1964, and then the subsequent 300 other poems published in 1969, The Dream Songs is generally considered John Berryman’s masterwork. Berryman worked within his own developed form with each poem consisting of 18 lines, divided up into three stanzas with six lines in each, and often with the third and the 6th line being shorter than the others. However, the content is anything but formal. Fracturing the syntax with both high and low speech mannerisms, Shakespeare mixed with street talk, drunken murmurings and declarative orations, drawing upon subjective personal experiences as well as other literary references (the deaths of American authors in particular), even interjecting the poems with multiple voices, the formal qualities to the poetry become secondary to the speech derived associations that make up the voice for the poetry. And the voice for these poems is not Berryman’s, but a man named, Henry, who often talks to and from himself in first, second and third person, as well as through Mr. Bones, a black-faced minstrel that plays a role similar to that of a Greek Chorus, or, if you place significance with his name, a memento mori that can quickly turn all of the poems into morbid elegies.

A bit confusing yes it is, as this is dense poetry that needs to be read with lots of breath space in order to allow the poetic shifts to come through with their own inflection and register; reading the poems in a singular, evenly paced, narrative voice rendering them incomprehensible. Yet, even with a carefully paced reading, there are still many that seem to not move beyond their obscurity. But when the poems do come together for the reader, that is when the magic happens, when the mishmash of emotions, the tangential thoughts, the loosely associated connections, create the core experience of Berryman’s idiosyncratic lingual gestures. 'Our breakdowns guarantee us,' sad a pal. (226)

At first I thought working through these poems is sort of like panning for gold, where after I found a poem which I thought was particularly striking, I placed a check beside its number in the Table of Contents for future reading. Although, the poems proved later to be more elusive for such solid impressions because when I went back to read the poems I had noted, on the second go around sometimes they didn't grab me as much as they originally had and on top of that, some other poem, say on the next page over for example, would then completely enthrall me even though I had not ‘checked’ it the first time around. “What’s going on with this book?” It felt like some sort of Borges short story where nothing is added or taken from the content of the book but between the time the book is closed and then reopened, the words and phrases take on a new lives of their own as they reformulate their textual arrangements, making it impossible to ever read again what had been read before.

And that’s what the title means to me. Despite Berryman often being classified as a confessional poet, these are not his dream songs, nor are they Henry’s, but the reader’s own dream songs. And perhaps this is why Berryman composed the poetry through the voice of a fictional character, so that the poetry would remain as material in which there could constantly emerge new relational experiences. So despite the abstraction, these poems are too much in the jugular to not have the potential to become powerful, even painful, transmitters for their emotional and psychic disturbances, the recognition of which largely being based upon the reader’s momentary receptivity. But like any dream, there is both prominence and graciousness derived from the ephemeral nature of these subconscious dwellings, which occasionally surface only to then sink back down into the opaque depths. What to make of them? The next person you see begin telling them one of your dreams last night and see how long you can hold their interest, noticing yourself how impossible it is to fully convey the experience of the dream– yet there is no doubt in your little baffled mind just how real that dream was.

[Fisherman; Heinrich Campendonk]

[Girl With Frogs; Heinrich Campendonk]

"Fox and Hare" was the first solo project from the famous russian animator, Yuri Norstein. Previously on this blog, his award winning "Hedgehog in the Fog" was posted. The story for "Fox and Hare" isn't quite as good as Hedgehog, as well as the animation for that matter, but the artistic qualities are still wonderful.

In case you were wondering just who Mayakovskky’s top totty actually was, it was Lili Brik, who also happened to be top totty for her husband, Osip Brik. But this actually turned out to be a rather successful ménage-à-trois as Mayakovsky lived with the couple for a number of years while carrying on his own relationships with Lili. Eventually Lili split from both Osip and Mayakovsky and towards the end of the relationship, Mayakovsky’s groundbreaking book Pro eto. Ei i mne. (About this. To her and to me.) was written. The poems contain the usual ingrediants for domestic life but are seen as objects of social control, the spin providing a critique against the traditional bourgeois lifestyles, marriage in particular. Although the book is probably better known for the pages also being filled with the artwork of Alexander Rodchenko, which were some of the first graphic art collages to be printed– composed in dada fashion with various Russian and Futurist images, as well as, more often than not, with Lili somewhere on the page (her face adorning the cover). Mayakovsky's poetry from this point on developed a more personal, solemn voice, as what you might hear from a wounded beast heading towards the deepest woods for his final decline. One of Maykovsky's last poems is below, portions of which he used for a suicide note :

It’s deep into the night. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way lit up in celebration.
No need to rush. I have no reasons left
to stir you with the lightning of communications.
So to say, the incident dissolved.*
The love boat smashed against reality.
We’re even. And we should absolve
mutual hurts, grudges and anxieties.
What eerie silence, as if the world went numb.
The sky bequeathed to us its constellations.
In moments like these I’d like to be the one
with centuries, and history and the creation.

1930

(link/translation)

One of Mayakovsky’s most well known poems also happened to be an earlier one, "Cloud in Pants" (sometimes translated as "Cloud in Trousers", which I prefer). A full translation is available here and is best read with the pandemonium of a Prokofiev symphony turned up in the other room. The operatic sentiment is over the top and the theatrical energy is explosive.

Written prior to the Russian Revolution, it is an attack upon the former power structures of Russia, as through the story of a spurned lover who takes the form of a vengeful ghost. Form is that of a tetraptych. But first begins with a Prologue, which could be seen as a parody for the traditional calling upon the muse for the poet’s guidance:

Sophisticates,
play their love on a violin.
For yobbos a drum will do.
They like to bang.
......................But who,
except me, can turn him—
self inside out into
a pair of lips
spitting out pips?

Part One, ‘Down with Love’, begins the narrative, where we find a man feverishly waiting for his lover, only to have the racking of his nerves be for nought, coldly denied. At the end of the section, flashpoint hits and causes a transformation into the flames of a disembodied language:

(((((Torched figures of speech
escape from my head
like children from a blazing building.
Fear is a tornado sucking in the sky
and lifting in its eye
the torched hulk of the Lusitania.
Into luxury cabins
where passengers hide
lasers of flame multiply.)))))

I’m on fire.
I’m on fire.

In Part Two, ‘Down With You Art’, Barnum’s Zarathustra begins the retribution:

Our task is to strip
the facade to tatters. And put the boot in,
rupturing what is within, to stamp it out.

Modest assistance is not sought.
To hell with hymns, four part choirs.
All we require to make our poems
is the hum of hard work in foundries,
the labouring masses, blood and sweat.

Incidentally, that Faust fellow
was just playing extravagant games
with the devil on a carpet.
Damnation! A nail in my shoe
hurts more than all Goethe.

I should know. My gift of the gab
makes every word trip off the tongue,
a feast day for the body and soul.
I say unto you, the merest spark
of life in a living man means more than
the sum total of what I do or have done.

Part Three, 'Down with Society', becomes more carnal:

...............I curse,
.........................coax,
...............extort,
.........................abort,
...............knife,
.........................bite
...............deep
.........................into
...............meat,
.........................chew
...............tender
.........................parts.
...............Enter
.........................hearts.

The sky
must die.
Bright hope
declines.

Its
light
revoked,
splits
into
gloams.

Night
chops in two
and eats the mess
of potage. You.

No residue,
except the bones
and darkness.

(Trust the Judas sky
with its double-agent
stars. Night feasts too
on the rump of the city).

Sunset
bleeds to death.

Finally, in Part Four, 'Down with Your Religion', the chaos continues but with this, our hero attempts a renewal through the second courtship of Maria, but only to again be turned away, the wound consequentially leading to a challenge with his father:

The haemorrhaging path
leads to my father’s house.
I’ll arrive, derelict from
rough living, rough dying,
But not too dead to stoop
and bawl in his ear,

“Listen, mister god,
your eyes must stream
from sticking hairy eyebrows
in the celestial blancmange
day after day. Why don’t you
climb down and join me
in a dance around the May Pole
garlanded by good and evil?
You have the keys to cupboards
everywhere. Let’s unlock the wine.
You’ll find, even your gloomy apostles
and the virgin martyrs will want to
step out and dance a fandango.

We could set up a couple of little Eves.
And heaven would be heaven again.
Just say the word. A nod will do. Tonight
I’ll trawl the boulevards for top totty.

Wouldn’t you like that?

.............................The only sign

is wind stirring in your beard....

The poetic approach of Mayakovsky has influenced a number of American poets. Most notable probably being Allen Ginsberg, matched equally in political ferociousness as well as in the use of exclamatory readings to propel his verse. A more surprising match would be Frank O’Hara, who was not political, or even in need of a podium for that matter, sitting down with a coke actually being more his style, but he did share in the use of convulsive leaps and associations to infuse the poetry with uncontainable dynamics. The Russian Futurist manifesto, ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’, can clarify further:

We order that the poets’ rights be revered:

To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).

To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.

To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches.

To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.

And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of your “common sense” and “good taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word.

However, after digging a bit further into the origins of Futurism, what I found especially interesting was the connection with the monstrosity of America's Frederick Seidel. If you are not familiar with Seidel, he writes with sort of a perverse blend of couplets, distorted rhyme schemes and free verse to gush about his exclusive privilege as an independently wealthy white male and its abundant lifestyle of sex, exotic travel, fine art, Ducati motorcycles, etc. What was clear to me before was the poetic persona created from imperialism and apocalyptic visions- in which he is at the center of it all- while at the same time displaying an unapologetic (even admirable) lust for life, now reminding me of a character you might find in Bolaño’s 2666. While I could see the duality in Seidel's poetry, I always thought that there was a piece missing from my understanding. Mainly, that there must have been some other poetic lineage which would allow Seidel to be so extreme while also being so well respected, and so important (and also the singular best reason why MFA programs can be critiqued, as no one would dare read such poems before a proctor and fellow peers). But when I read about Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, who was the founder of the Futurist movement in Italy, it all fell into place. From his own manifesto:

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

In the decade prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, an artistic movement known as Russian Futurism was taking place. As an extension of the Futurists in Italy, they were part of a group who were in opposition to traditional power structures, believed in technological industry for the promotion of change and found it necessary to challenge the social order of bourgeois society, often by allowing themselves unhindered artistic freedom. In Russia, it was largely a literary movement and among the writers involved was the poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Because of the socialist themes found in some of his writing, and along with the physical prowess which allowed him to captivate crowds of people wherever he spoke, Mayakovsky became the national poet of Russia from about the time of the Russian Revolution up to the emerging tyranny of Stalin. However, while Mayakovsky was influential in the political realm, even helping out with propaganda for the revolution, its his role as a poet that made me want to learn more about him.

What is most noticeable about Mayakovksy’s poetry is the oratorical weight behind the words. Using breath oriented lines, as similar to the projective verse of American poets, there is an amplification within the poetry that resembles the outward forms of direct ‘speech’, as opposed to the subdued nature of ‘reading’. Excitement emerges and especially when combined with leaps in subject matter and exclamatory word choice, reminding me at times of the early French Surrealists, only followed up with metaphysical force rather then dream-like abstraction. In the political realm, this sort of rabble-rousing is something to be suspect, but when looked at for artistic merits only, a certain thrill is brought to the page. What was once bravado used to stir up the spirits of the masses, is now, in a time when this form of activism is outdated (more democratic technological mediums replacing such charismatic figureheads), a poetry that can be instead read for its kinetic surprises and amplified drama. Imagine the Jolly Green Giant gone Bolshevik.

While this can bring in a wild unexpectedness to the poetry, as emotions are thrown into the uproar of visual images, from language drawn upon both the high and low, a speech catalyzed through vivid word selection (where, actually, an English reader’s understanding falls short-- Mayakovsky being labeled by Russians as being impossible to effectively translate), it can also make for some bad poetry. But even on the off days, as with many other Dionysian artists, admiration is still found in the spirit brought to the work. Comment from Joseph Brodsky:

Maybe you're too shut up inside yourself, whereas here was a genuine nature, an extrovert, doing everything on the grand scale. If his poems are bad, there's good reason for it. Bad poems are a poet's bad days. And Mayakovsky did have quite a few bad days in his life, but when things got their absolue worst, he came up with some great poems. Of course, he let his tongue run away with him completely. Mayakovsky was the first major victim, for he had a major gift.

A possible explanation for the last sentence in the Brodsky quote: at the age of 37, Mayakovsky shot himself. While he claimed it was because of a matter of the heart, it appears that it is not just a romantic assumption that his suicide was tied to the rise of Stalin. The revolution which he had fought for earlier in his life had taken drastically negative turns as ironclad social control had replaced the near anarchistic vision Maykovsky embraced earlier in his life, thus taking from him both his past efforts, the autocracy of Russia removed only to be replaced with totalitarianism, as well his future creativity, the fellow poets of his time all either imprisoned or killed and replaced with state-recognized “proletarian poets”.

Game Night
--Conor O'Callaghan
[from Poetry, 03/2009]

Love not
being in the loop.

Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
SUVS in the IT lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.

Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.

And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?

I knew there would be butterflies
For butterflies represent the last soul
Represent the way the wind wanders
Represent the bodies
We only clasp in the middle of a poem.
See, the stars have faded.
There are only butterflies.
Listen to
The terrible sound of their wings moving.
Listen,
The poem isn't over.

--from Song for Bird and Myself; Jack Spicer

Towards the end of Spicer's life he still worked faithfully in his notion of construction developing from concepts echoing off one another. Earlier in his writing life, this involved longer, multiple page list-like poems, which are not easily represented in a blog post. But later, towards the end of Spicer's life, the poems were instead divided up into sections and with each section then composed of about a dozen or so lines, Spicer's book, Language, being a shining example and in which Spicer explores how poetry is dualistically capable and incapable of commenting upon the grandest and most ephemeral concepts of our existence-- mainly life, death, love and desire, which makes for poetry that is as beautiful as it is haunting, definitive as it is open. Spicer's reading of Language in its entirety can be read here. From the second section of 'Graphemics':



It's been raining five days and will probably keep raining five
......days more
I get up in the morning, see the treacherous sun and try to read
......the Indian signs on the pavement. Not much water. Has it
......been raining while I dreamed?
The sky is no help. The clouds are to the east and the sky
......(treacherous blue) is no help. It is going to rain from the
......west.
Nevertheless (while the wind is blowing from the west) I can
......smell the clouds that won't appear-- but will for five or ten
......days. Your heart, and the sky has a hole in it.
In my heart, as Verlain said, I can hear the little sound of it
......raining
Not an Indian sign. But real unfucking rain.

[Still Water (The River Thames for Example); Roni Horn [via]; 1999]

.....The city of Boston is filled with frogheaded flies and British policemen. The other day I saw the corpse of Emily Dickinson floating up the Charles River.

.....Sweet God, it is lonely to be dead. Sweet God, is there any god to worship? God stands in Boston like a public statue. Sweet God, is there any God to swear love by? Or love-- it is lonely, is lonely, is lonely to be lonely in Boston.

.....Now Emily Dickinson is floating down the Charles River like an Indian princess. Now naked savages are climbing out of all the graveyards. Now the Holy Ghost drips birdshit on the nose of God. Now the whole thing stops. Sweet God, poetry hates Boston.

--Jack Spicer

3.

....."Poor bastards, trying to get through hell in a hurry." Pray for them bastards who are not patient enought to listen. The flying leaves of a moving tree, a bleeding tree. In a crowd of imaginary images.

.....Pray for them poor bastards who are too crowded to listen. An angle cutting off every surface to the prayer, the poem, the messages. And angle of the mind. Meaning to do this.

.....They go through life till the next morning. As we all do. But constantly. As if the shimmering before them were not hell but the reach of something.

.....Teach.

--from 'A Textbook of Poetry', Jack Spicer

When I had first picked up My Vocabulary Did This To Me, The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, my knowledge of Spicer was of him being one of the precursors for The Language Poets. A correct understanding, but I had not known about Spicer's acerbic voice, the thrust of his poetry spoken in a cut-the-shit attitude and defiant towards just about everything except for its own self-created strength.

While the approach is abstract, often relying heavily upon elliptical development, when reading you know immediately how Spicer's verbal mentations are to be spoken, as though his poetic voice was speaking directly from the pages of the book. And this is what I found to be truly unique with Spicer. As post-modern poetry runs the risk of being a more methodical than personal art form, based in the text of the head rather than the words of the breath, Spicer’s poetry demonstrates how the two don’t have to run in separate and distinct camps, but can work off each other for a rigor of artistry grounded equally in both construction and expression.

Understanding some of Spicer’s background explains how this came about. As a fiercely defiant homosexual, a certain degree of anger is evident and poetry must have been a way to both affirm and proclaim a lifestyle which, at that time of American history, was not socially acceptable. This is especially apparent in his earlier poems, as one might expect as this is a quality attributable to many people in their 20's. Additionally, Spicer was inherently suspicious of groups, an example being how he stood seperate from the Beat Poets and the New York Poets during the 1950's despite his having social contacts in both.

Tied with this dramatic approach was Spicer’s studies in linguistic theories, which lead Spicer to varied experiential approaches rather than confining himself to a single attributable form. As a result, Spicer was more project oriented, publishing in small chapbooks during his life rather than more comprehensive volumes. However, one form which Spicer did work in fairly regularly was that of serial list poetry, which creates tension through lines initially found to be disjunctive but later, as the poem progresses, develop coherency as the concepts begin echoing one another. “Things do not connect; they correspond.”

With the combination of these backgrounds, Spicer’s poetry can be quite challenging at an intellectual level, with each poem needing to be worked through with a certain amount of patience during a first read, but the poems are also pared with emotional intensities that refuse to hide from the ranges of human experience, something which Spicer courageously reveled in for the purpose of his poetic embrace. From ‘Orfeo’:

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.

The moxie of Spicer shines through, and never when reading Spicer's poems did I not hear this imperative and rigorous voice, fiercely unapologetic to the expectations of the reader, whether the desire for sentimental content or being presumptuous towards the forms in which poetry should be contained. What results in the end is the mythic will of the poet to endure artistically and emotionally, the same backbone found in the determination of Sisyphus to again place his shoulder against the stone or Prometheus suffering through the binding pains in defiance of Zeus. If such are lived through, only an astounding musical language can result.

[Fisher Girl; Winslow Homer, 1894]

An impassioned reading by Olson of 'The Librarian'-- as a thespian as well as a poet for this dark and powerful poem. The voice in the poem is that of Maximus, a poetic persona developed by Olson, and the tension develops from Maximus' conflict with the librarian. The 'cut' being referred to is a canal in Gloucester into which bouquets of flowers are thrown by friends of fisherman during outgoing tides. More about the poem can be read here, but I think the dramatic power of the work can stand on its own without further explanation.

Black space,
of fish-house.
Motions
of ghosts.
I,
dogging his steps.
He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
give me
what in the instant
I knew better of.

But the somber
place, the flooring
crude like a wharf's
and a barn's
space

The Moon is the Number 18

is a monstrance,
the blue dogs bay,
and the son sits,
grieving

is a grinning god, is
the mouth of, is
the dripping moon

while in the tower the cat
preens
and all motion is a crab

and there is nothing he can do but what they do, watch
the face of waters, and fire

..........The blue dogs paw,
..........like the droppings, dew
..........or blood, whatever
..........results are. And night,
..........the crab, rays round
..........attentive as the cat to catch
..........human sound

..........The blue dogs rue,
..........as he does, as he would howl, confronting
..........the wind which rocks what was her, while prayers
..........striate the snow, words blow
..........as questions cross fast, fast
..........as flames, as flames form, melt
..........along any darkness

Birth is an instance as is a host, namely, death

The moon has no air

..........In the red tower
..........in that tower where she also sat
..........is that particular tower where watching & moving are,
..........there,
..........there where what triumph there is, is: there
..........is all substance, all creature
..........all there is against the dirty moon, against
..........number, image, sortilege--

..........alone with cat & crab,
..........and sound is, is, his
..........conjecture

--Charles Olson

I had previously only known of Olson's epic works, so was suprised to find within his Collected Poems a number of short, intense poems, and which are just as representational of the "primitive abstract" as his longer constructions. Some examples:

Going from Battle to Battle
The earth lay golden green
in the summer sunlight

The ancient mountains
spilled the afternoon
as firmly as they've flattened
all the valleys

And life is new
the generous day



The Picture
what a traffick amongst limbs and loins,
wombs, we and our children are, tupping
the white lamb, legs flying, grasping
in the air the hips, locking
about the intruder, the fucking
we are the topside bottoms-up agents
of. The picture, so drawn



"You know, verse/is a lovely thing..."
You know, verse
is a lovely thing.

It issues,
like the vapors,

from the rock



"I was stretched out on the earth..."
I was stretched out on the earth...so that a wild geranium
was looking down into my face
at a wild geranium



"tenementy twilight landscape..."
.....tenementy twilight landscape
.....into which motorcycle with
.....scorpion tale-tail

passes



"right in my eye..."
right in my eye the west sun zing saying
level glance dig man I'm setting what are you
doing today



To the Algae
Never to say not to the algae suddenly
pink coral spine

Charles Olson wrote a personal manifesto on projective verse in 1950, which can be read in its entirety here, and which I recommend for anyone interested in contemporary poetry, whether Olson is included or not. Summary is not really possible, but a listing of selected phrases, in the order that they appear, is:

"possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man"

"a high energy-constructed and, at all points, an energy-discharge"

"there it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE."

"keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions"

"breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause"

"the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance"

"each moment of the going"

"the poet through his attentiveness (PLAY of mind)"

"participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly... objects of reality"

"a poem has, by speech, solidity"

"conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open"

"get back to word as handle"

"syllable, line, field"

"emphasis upon the typewriter as the personal"

"for a man is himself an object"

"breath is man's special qualifications as animal"

"a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs."


The major emphasis of the poetry being based upon the breath was what allowed me to relate to Olson’s poetry much more than I had anticipated. "This is a human that is speaking! Talking! not merely thinking." If you approach his work through the intellect only, his work will become frustrating, in the same someone might try to score jazz improv. I blame T. S. Eliot for any such narrowed attempt, a criticism Olson hits upon. Unfortunately, Eliot taints a vast majority of people’s understanding of poetry, as he is one of the more widely taught modern American poets in High Schools-- probably as a result of footnotes being a lot easier to test students with in this calculative era then conveying aesthetical qualities, as what you find in Stevens, Williams and Moore (Pound being something else all together).

With Robert Creeley was fellow Black Mountain poet, Charles Olson, as the other main progenitor of projective verse. Where Creeley could be identified as the micro-voice for kitchen table observations, personal and reflective over some black coffee, Olson could be heard as the macro-voice, stepping out onto his front porch to begin a stroll through the open history of the local, extending as far back as the dawn of man and then up to the conscious presence of the poetry’s dictation. For various reasons, I have refrained from endeavoring into Olson’s poetry-- as from being intimidated by both his abstracted style and 'visions of grandeur'-- but what I found though in his Collected Poems was, most importantly, language which always maintained an immediacy which, in turn, was quite personal and much more accessible than I had anticipated. The lesson I guess is to never rely upon what's sampled within an anthology.

Comparatively though, Creeley is still a much easier poet to grasp than Olson because of the intimacies contained within his subjects. However, a reader has to remember that Olson didn’t start writing poetry until he was in his younger 30's (prior wanting to be a Melville scholar) and the passing at the age of 60 prevented the final shaping of a lot of his material. As such, the majority of his Collected Poems were not published in his lifetime and makes the reader question which of the poems were actually ‘completed’ and ready for an audience. This being much different than Creeley who published individual volumes through the entirety of his career.

As you might guess, Olson’s Collected Poems is not a very good collection to read straight through and much better to become acquainted with over an extended period of time. A comparison could be made with Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems, a process oriented poet who always wrote ‘on the fly’ and without much concern for synthesizing his subject matter. Olson’s collection is not nearly as haphazard as O'Hara's, but it is still filled with material that repeats itself, offers different drafts of the same poem, trails off into obscure tangents, etc., aspects which are most easily handled in half hour blocks, especially when considering the denseness of Olson's poetry.

With a little time, what a reader will find is a powerful experience based in a language that is as specific as William Carlos Williams but immensely grand in topical scope, which the University of California Press identifies as “empowering love, political responsibility, historical discovery and cultural reckoning, the wisdom of dreams and the transformation of consciousness”. Plus, because many of the poems are technically unfinished, there is wildness in the writing which lets you know you're reading creations which the author was not holding back on at all, a quality which likely would have gotten lost if the writings were tidied up for publication.

5

Soul, and Psyche, and Animus (Will
: a man's life to be a continual
Allegory
............all which is and happens,
that one brings about, crushing
like a herd of frightened elephant anything
under foot, passing as I did
on the back of the Elephant altogether puzzling
to me how we did go between trees through
everything as a will passed through any obstacle
he was as anagogic visions in his power to
pass,
......the Elephant
on whose back I also was slim

--from West 4 & 5

[Tree and Corners]

['Dear Cat'; Archie Rand & Robert Creeley]

Dear cat, I see you
and will attend
and feed you
now as then

It was John Yau who had introduced us some years ago in New York. Archie's humor, quickness, and lack of pretension much attracted me, but the chance to work with him was curiously hard to come by despite his own play with narrative texts and old-time comic book formats. Then Archie sent me a cluster of xeroxes of drawings he'd been doing and suggested I might do some text or texts to go with them. It was an instantly attractive proposal.... (from Conjunctions 32 Spring 99)

From a 1999 Arizona Univeristy interview:

What are the sources of humor in your poetry?

Robert Creeley: Displacement, self-reflection, recognition of commonness. There's no simple resource -- but insofar as "the poet thinks with his poem," as Williams put it, humor will be a factor. Humor has the same intimacy as poetry, is local in the same way (as Rene Thom observed). Both rely entirely on humanness per se for their existence.

What do you mean by “displacement?” Do you mean actual displacement? For instance, I was born in Vietnam and grew up in America. If so, how is it related with humor?

RC: I was thinking that humor disarms us, makes us "helpless" (with laughter, for instance). Somehow it provokes recognition of a world we cannot finally control or surround with our thought. For example, I am moved that "happen" and "happiness" have the same root. So I was thinking of "displacement" as that which takes us out of our determined patterns of control, makes us conscious of vulnerabilities, confusions, errors ("bloopers"), etc. Of course, there is legitimately the person who says, that wasn't funny! Even more to the point -- that was not supposed to be funny. Perhaps humor is the perception (or comes from it) that we are without defence, once we recognize we are literally alive. "Born to die," that's a good joke?

From a 1998 Cortland Review interview:

J.M.S.: Very often a poem is dead as it is being written, or, simply put, despite substance, the poem just isn't good. Every poet has a different theory as to why that is. What is your theory?

Robert Creeley: Williams puts it best in Paterson: "Because it's there to be written...." If one only wrote "good" poems, what a dreary world it would be. "Writing writing" is the point. It's a process, like they say, not a production line. I love the story of Neal Cassidy writing on the bus with Ken Kesey, simply tossing the pages out the window as he finished each one. "I wonder if it was any good," I can hear someone saying. Did you ever go swimming without a place you were necessarily swimming to—the dock, say, or the lighthouse, the moored boat, the drowning woman? Did you always swim well, enter the water cleanly, proceed with efficient strokes and a steady flutter kick? I wonder if this "good" poem business is finally some echo of trying to get mother to pay attention.

From a 2004 MIPO interview:

With the exponential growth of media, publishing, the internet, there is a sense that there is too much good writing to know....

Robert Creeley: I think poetry like music is probably its own reward – like dancing, like life itself. It’s making poetry that’s the pleasure, as it’s the same with making music. The judgment as to whether or not it’s good is something else – and certainly saving it is, when one’s doing it. In short, I am not an archivist nor a critic – and if I have saved anything over the years, it’s for the simple reason Pound then noted: “What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee…” Hank Williams would tell you the same thing.

As We Sit
--Robert Creeley

There is a long
stretch of sky
before us. The road

goes out to the channel
of the water. Birds
fly in the faintly

white sky. A sound
shuffles over
and over, shifting

sand and
water. A wind
blows steadily
as we sit.

“Was Robert Creeley a solipsist?” That was another question I kept in mind while spending the weekend with Creeley’s work. And I’m not referring to Creeley’s personal psychology, as I don’t know anything about his private life and that not being relevant to his poetry. What is relevant is the extent to which he subscribed to solipsism for his aesthetical and philosophical developments. Some examples:


The choice is simply,
I will-- as mind is a finger,
pointing, as wonder
a place to be
[from 'The Finger']

egocentric
abstraction--
no one

else but
me again,
and people,

people as if
behind glass,
close

but untouchable.
[from 'Hong Kong Window']

In pajamas still
late morning sun's at my back
again through the window,
figuring mind still, figuring place
I am in, which is me,
solisistic, a loop yet moving, moving,
with these insistent proposals
[from Histoire De Florida]



This approach gives Creeley’s poetry a chiseled-from-the-air quality, crystallized with hard minded intent and its after-echoes of implicative meaning. On the other hand, Creeley can also seem like he’s roaring his singular phallus across the waters of his consciousness, being reductive rather than expansive. However, Creeley was able to find a comedic understanding to his solipsistic tendencies. From his last collection, On Earth:

Bye and Bye

Faded in face of apparent reality--
As it comes, I see it still goes on and on,
and even now still sitting at this table
is the smiling man who nobody seems to know.

Older, the walls apparently get higher.
No one seemingly gets to look over
to see the people pointing at the sky
where the old planes used to fly over.

I packed my own reality in a bag
and pushed it under the table,
thinking to retrieve it when able
some time bye and bye.

While I have enjoyed Robert Creeley’s poetry for many years, what strikes me now after a more in depth reading into the entire span of his writing life is how deft Creeley was at combining the subjectively personal with innovative forms. Too often a poet falls more towards one or the other and leaves the other side undeveloped. How Creeley achieves his pitch perfect balance probably is a result of his working under the premise of ‘form being an extension of content’, meaning that when determining how to approach his subject matter, it was the way in which the subject should be expressed in the poem that was probably dwelled or focused upon more after the initial inspiration than the 'what' of his subject that he wanted to relay through the poem.

If you are not familiar with Creeley’s work, what is most attributed to his poetry is the development of projective verse, which, loosely put, utilizes short one-breath lines and with each line extending what had been placed into the poem through the preceding line, done with the intent of creating immediacy within the poetry for the purpose of compounding new thoughts and possibilities within the reader as the poem progresses down the page (reference bookcover above). In its most experimental mode, as found in Creeley’s earlier poems, the percussive breakdown of syntax and play with enjambment was relied upon as much as the poetic images or ideas, resulting in a fragmented speech-- often strained and emotive-- that simultaneously conjured new relationships at the intellectual level.

In this mode of writing, the poems can result in surprising lyrical sensations with each with its own unique music, express the dramatic breakdown of the communicability of emotions and thoughts- as can be found however a ‘crisis’ may manifest itself, push the ways in which we understand our experiences into philosophical inquiries, such as the examination of memory, or, when Creeley is at his best, densely incorporate all of these aspects and dramatically doing so within a minimal number of lines and words. The poem 'The Window' being an excellent example and one of his most famous, and a personal favorite of my own (as it probably is for a lot of Creeley readers).

Towards the end of Creeley’s life though his writing also began to incorporate prose oriented language styles, such as through the use of long lines and full sentences, as well as forms that have a resemblance to more traditional verse poetry. It was this period of Creeley’s writing that I had not been familiar with and specifically wanted to learn about when picking up his Selected Poems, 1945-2005. Not surprisingly, the subject matter is more often than not what a man thinks about when entering his elder years– death of himself, death of loved ones, the semi-permanence of memories in an impermanent reality, etc.

While the reasons behind Creeley’s change in poetic forms at this point in his life is open for anyone to speculate on, I propose he choose clearer forms as a means to finalize certain understandings– a need he must have felt to come to terms with his life as well as the simple fact that endings place closure upon what used to be, to us, open possibilities, whether it be the final melding of the interior with the exterior or a belief in the interior, of all that remains of one’s experience with life and made manifest through poetry. As with his earliest poems, form again used to express content.

[Untitled; Jasper Johns, 1998]

from A Thought Revolved
--Wallace Stevens

II
Mystic Garden & Middling Beast

The poet striding among the cigar stores,
Ryan's lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,
Denies that abstraction is a vice except
To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,
A space of stone, of inexplicable base
And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.
The era of the idea of man, that is the space,
The true abstract in which he promenades.
The era of the idea of man, the cloak
And speech of Virgil dropped, that's where he walks,
That's where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,
Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant,
Happy rather than holy but happy-high,
Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes,
Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god
And the idea of man, the mystic garden and
The middling beast, the garden of paradise
And he that created the garden and peopled it.