That Fucking Merwin

Robert Archambeau reminds us that even Saint Creeley had anger issues:

I know a lot of people who loved Robert Creeley, who saw the old sage of Black Mountain and Buffalo as a generous mentor and friend, and he certainly was that. He may turn out to have meant more to more younger poets than any other figure of his generation. But if you read his letters, you see that he had as large a capacity for hatred as he had for paternal or avuncular love. He despises Theodore Roethke and Louis Simpson, hurls abuse at Helen Vendler, spews bile in the direction of Louise Glück and Charles Wright, dismisses Kenneth Koch as a lightweight, and talks about cutting Frank O’Hara (the editors of the letters work hard, in a footnote, to explain this away as metaphorical, and may be right). “Fuck him,” he says of Kenneth Patchen, and he tells us how “that fucking Merwin” is a “a symbol of rot.” He clearly sees battle lines drawn between a kind of poetry he admires and the kinds he does not, and he takes exception when the people who should be on his side appear to cross the line and embrace the enemy. “I will never forget this,” he writes to Kenneth Rexroth, when the older poet treasonously supported Roethke; and when William Carlos Williams spoke approvingly of W. H. Auden, Creeley demanded to know whether someone had held a gun to Williams’ back. Academics have a special place in Creeley’s inferno—even after so many of them had come to accept his views about who the important poets were. In 1985, he tells us that academics wouldn’t deign to write about Williams or Olson—and does so with such vehemence that I wouldn’t want to have been the one to tell him of the half dozen prominent academic articles on Olson that year alone, or the three dozen on Williams, or of the professor who’d just edited the sixth volume of Creeley’s correspondence with Olson. Resentment outlives its occasion, and those who harbor it don’t want to be reminded of the fact.

Manifest Destiny

Ange Mlinko assesses Jorie Graham's challenging career:

Born in 1950 in the United States, raised in Italy, educated in France, and only returning to her native country as a young adult, Graham is, along with John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel, one of the very few living American poets to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century. She has seized for her own uses a patrimony rich with philosophical and linguistic experimentation, bypassing the sort of small-scale, homegrown free verse that has come to dominate the journals and university programs and public-radio stations of our time. Although she has not published collections of essays or lectures, she has taught for 30 years, first at Iowa and now at Harvard (where she inherited the Boylston Chair from Seamus Heaney), and has edited two major poetry anthologies, securing her influence on successive generations of poets and readers. Having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first Selected Poems, she is now seeing the publication of her second. From the New World expands on the nearly 200-page The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which spanned her first five books; the new Selected covers the six books she has written since then, and presents four new poems as well. To remain a “frustrating and problematic” public figure for 40 years is a hard labor: Everything in the television and Internet age militates against it. To mine the legacy of the Modernists—specifically Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore—while making apt references to Pascal and Heidegger and Rimbaud and Rilke, at a time when the field of American poetry is becoming an adjunct of pop culture, is also a feat of integrity requiring an antisocial streak in our crowdsourcing age. And Graham has been warily celebrated for—or is it despite?—resisting expectations of speed, amusement, and digestibility. This also means resisting some of the classical pleasures of poetry: epigrammatic wit (or the “memorable line”), phrase-making, and metaphor—­the Apollonian qualities, you might say, of contour, line, and limit, and hence closure, a concept that is anathema to Graham and perhaps her country. There is a certain irony in Graham’s resistance and Americanness: Her long-lined long poems expand into time like a lyric version of manifest destiny.

Bard of the Fallow Field

Stephen Burt traces poems by poets as diverse as John Ashbery, David Baker, Michael Dickman and David Morley back to a single progenitor: John Clare.

Almost everything that could have seemed, to a nineteenth-century reader, like a reason to count Clare as minor, or not to read him, makes him a resource for poets today. “Bard of the fallow field / And the green meadow,” as he called himself, Clare remained closely attentive to what we now call his environment, what he called “nature,” in a way that is neither touristic nor ignorant of agricultural effort. He saw tragic ironies all over the place, but he never sought verbal ironies himself: he is about as sincere (if not naive) as poets get.

A Mishmash of Multitudes

Todd Gitlin remembers the late C.K. Williams:

He and I once had an enjoyable argument—half playful, half earnest—on the question of whether too many books were being published. I thought so. He thought not. His was the greater democratic faith. He was a populist, not meaning someone tasteless or talking down, but a man who lives in the large—360 degrees around. He was large and he contained a mishmash of multitudes and privileged no objects, no cultural levels, over others. I heard him read his work several times in several cities, and I was always struck by the modesty of his demeanor. He knew his work was read, and loved, and he didn’t think anyone’s reading or admiration, or love, was more or less worthy than anyone else’s.

Canadian Oresteia

Robert Moore praises Chad Campbell's debut Laws & Locks:

As family drama—the family as the source of a curse passed from generation to generation—Laws & Locks is a Canadian Oresteia, only without the laughs of the original. There is in the entire volume, so far as I can tell, no lapse into the humourous or even the vaguely ironic (Nabokov’s line from Speak, Memory, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much,” could easily have made it to the shortlist for this volume’s epigraph). It is a very dark book. Over the course of its progress through two centuries of Campbells, very little emotional or intellectual light mitigates the gloom of the book’s opening reminder that death is only a breath away or that Canada, for all its apparent promise to an immigrant, “was a thought/ that couldn’t stopper the dark/ rank water of a dark/ rank hold.”

Along with the consistency of shadow, neither the basic subject matter nor the point of view, tone, or essential scheme of techniques of this collection much varies. And this, I think, is one of its strengths, especially for a first book. Campbell isn’t about to be distracted from his solemn agenda by the merely arcane. (This is the advice he tacitly offers in “Lighthouse Beats” to poets whose tastes might run to the postmodern: “Too easy to write of oddities, catalogue curious things—/ mistake a peculiarity of vision for feeling.”) As a result of this discipline, Laws & Locks isn’t what so many debut collections tend to be: a potpourri of voices—of attitudes either struck or borrowed—from a poet who has yet to find his or her own. These poems, rather, read as if they sprang fully formed from the settled and accomplished brow of a mature, mid-career poet.

Sunday Poem

FISH & BIRD 

The smallest cut has the fewest needs,
least of all attention. The largest cut's
requirements surpass our abilities.
It is impossible to find unless stumbled
upon, and then proves challenging to categorize.
Recognizable as flesh, is not slash or butterfly,
lance or scrape; neither prepared event or accident.
It exists between, a split not quite in twain.
The largest cut possesses unreachable depths
and blind, frightening fish. It's unlimited closets,
hidden attics, shakes with captured wind
from flapping birds' wings. To call it a sinkhole
wouldn't be totally wrong. The smallest cut
is your childhood and every memory a splinter.
The largest cut is your unused potential, a void
beckoning with ancestral moans like everything
you couldn't say, and everything you did.

By Allison LaSorda, from Playdate (Anstruther Press, 2015). 

Gala Poetry Launch, October 17, 2015, Drawn & Quarterly

Joshua Trotter reading from Mission Creep (Coach House)

David Solway reading from Installations (Signal Editions)

Derek Webster reading from Mockingbird (Signal Editions)

(From left) Talya Rubin, Derek Webster and Pat Webster

Saleema Nawaz Webster and Jennifer Varkonyi

(From bottom left:) Jennifer Varkonyi, Carmine Starnino, Simon Dardick, Derek Webster and Saleema Nawaz Webster