stevens
olson
james merrill
dickinson
ammons
bishop
spicer
bukowski
hart crane
creeley
"Perhaps, it is best, too, that one should have only glimpses of reality - and get the rest from the fairy-tales, from pictures, and music, and books". --Wallace Stevens
i'm not sure i can overestimate the impact reading stevens, all of stevens, had on me. i can't say that it felt like discovering a kindred spirit because i don't think our sensibilities worked on the same plane. reading "the necessary angel" you felt you had met a mind, a mind determined to make sense of its own actions, a mind focused on feeling out the nooks & crannies of the creative impulse. my mind has never been so subtle or patient but i certainly appreciated stevens' efforts.
mainly, you saw this same mind at work in the poems, even the most fanciful ones. in the poems, that mind worked w/emotions, impressions, & yes, fairy tales to create a universe both all-encompassing & finite, expansive but inclusive of everyday minutiae, hoon & the snowman. it was a rich & exotic world that constantly worked to strip itself of that richness & that exotica to get down to the kernel of specific imaginative activity that, in fact, creates the rich exotica world we live in.
& the tone of the voice that spoke to us from the poems? at his most expansive(the comedian as the letter c)or at his most reductive(of mere being), there's a tone that drew me to the poems like no other i'd heard before in my mind's ear. perhaps it's the tone of fairy tales or late night campfire stories, of wonder & awe but of a beholding too. beholding implies some kind of detachment or reserve or separation from what's being observed. i hear that too in stevens.
“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.”
how could you not be drawn to olson, his drama & insights. he was a big man & a big thinker who wrote big poems. big always risks misses; large leaves no room for details. OR large can feel compelled to fill itself in w/too many details, cluttering the space w/distractions or irrelevancies. certainly late olson became something like that.
but before that he was chancellor of black mountain college during its supreme years of artistic output(which carried over for generations). he wrote several important essays(projectivist verse, being one)& "call me ishmael," his great study of melville(which the above quote opened with). he wrote several great poems("the kingfishers" "in cold hell, in thicket" "la preface"). there is also his large epic poem, "maximus." at the time, only the first part of that poem(already book-length)was available.
To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility
We can be precise. The factors are
in the animal and/or the machine the factors are
communication and/or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events
distributed in time
is the birth of air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest
is change.
this, from "the kingfishers," is cerebral poetry at its best. unlike pound & eliot, olson doesn't reveal or even hint at his sources. unlike stevens, his imagination doesn't flow to the fairy tale but more to myth or the stripped down structure that myth embodies(mythos?). the poems are not intricately large universes peopled w/the strange & exotic but bare places, large in their use of space(the page, the poet's mind), inhabited by singular vision. the poem is a tool to work on/out ideas, real knotty & complex ideas of sometimes opposing natures. the poems reflect the effort. engaging the poems doubles that effort & becomes very real productive activity.
"I mean then words — as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem — I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which the poem may well point, as signboard. That concern I have found it best to settle elsewhere. I will not be misled by the “niceness” of any sentiment, or its converse, malevolence. I do not think a poet is necessarily a nice person. I think the poem’s morality is contained as a term of its structure, and is there to be determined and nowhere else."
creeley is, next to dickinson, the oddest poet to me. i think that's part of what drew me to him. there is a sense of interiority, of a near sweating torment, of struggle in his poems that i hadn't experienced before. dickinson's cramped hermetic poems may be the result of repressed desire or guilt from merely speaking out or trauma but there's still the sense of outwardness, that the poems are directed toward something or somebody. not so w/creeley. the poems may well be directed towards something or someone but those things or ones are in the poet's head & the cramped hermetic poems of creeley are sites wherein the tools of expression are formed & reformed over & over in an attempt to get it right or make it clear. the "it" is important, crucial to the project. the "it" that creeley struggles w/is the poem itself, the idea of the thing which above all else communicates, expresses the intention of communication itself. no wonder there's so much hesitation or stuttering felt & heard in the poems. to say what must be said requires deliberate tho active process, a clearing away of the extraneous to get at the root of meaning which can only be suggested based on whatever means of communication is available at the time:
the one man
i will
not
fuck to
night
is you
that complete poem is titled "curse." eleven monosyllabic words that if spoken at the right time to the right person would surely be a "curse." of course, the pun built around the "curse" word, fuck, pulls the poem in another direction. if you read any of wittgenstein's philosophy you get the same feeling, that each utterance is being SOUNDED for sense, that each word is being carefully considered for its lack or failure as much as for its appropriateness. if one is called to write, by whom is that call issued? & to answer such a call, what is required? creeley's best work tries to address those questions.
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