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The Argotist Online |
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Neither Us nor Them: Poetry Anthologies, Canon Building, by David
Clippinger The surest, and often the only, way by which a crowd can preserve itself lies in the existence of a second crowd to which it is related. Whether the two crowds confront each other as rivals in a game, or as a serious threat to each other, the sight, or simply the powerful image of the second crowd, prevents the disintegration of the first. As long as all eyes are turned in the direction of the eyes opposite, knee will stand locked by knee; as long as all ears are listening for the expected shout from the other side, arms will move to a common rhythm. (Elias
Canetti, Crowds and Power) Part
I
“So Large in His Singleness”By
1960 William Bronk had published a collection, Light and Dark (1956), and his poems had appeared in The
New Yorker, Poetry, Origin, and Black
Mountain Review. More, Bronk
had earned the admiration of George Oppen and Charles Olson, as well as Cid Corman, editor of Origin, James Weil, editor of Elizabeth Press, and Robert Creeley.
But given the rendering of the late 1950s and early 1960s poetry scene as
crystallized by literary history, Bronk seems to be wholly absent—a veritable
lacuna in the annals of poetry. Despite
evidence of his presence, it is almost as if William Bronk did not exist at
least until 1982 with the National Book Award for Life
Supports: New and Collected Poems. Bronk’s erasure unveils a gap in
cultural memory. Bronk's apolitical poetry was not in keeping with the
political tastes of the time, yet his publications seemed to have gained a
"literary" presence. Nevertheless,
the silencing of poets such as William Bronk, when placed in a socio-historical
context, accentuates the processes and assumptions that were central to the
political and literary dialectics of late 1950s and early 1960s poetry
canons and the symbolic nature of canon-building as manifest in and by the
anthologies. To
fully comprehend the case of William Bronk, one must revisit the portrayal of
the poetry environment of the time—the one that has been reified by literary
history and originates in Robert Lowell’s acceptance speech for the National
Book Award in 1960 for Life Studies,
where he off-handedly describes the current scene of American poetry as a
tension between two divisive poetic positions—the “raw” and “cooked.” Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw.
The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be
tasted and digested by a graduate seminar.
The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished
up for midnight listeners. There is
a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a
poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal.1 The
distinction between the raw and the cooked, filtered through the structuralist
lens of Levi-Strauss as a way of differentiating the binary of “savage” and
“civilized” discourse, involves both poets and readers in Lowell’s
assessment. Further, the depiction of two poetic camps gestures towards the
tendency to categorize and reduce things into “digestible” binaries—a
Hegelian dialectic of points and counterpoints that “represents” history and
bears directly upon the processes of canon formations and anthologies.
In
1960, Lowell’s comment articulates the conflict of poetries that had been
seething throughout the 1950s and would come to a head in May of 1960 with the
publication of Donald Allen’s The New
American Poetry. Donald Allen,
the editor of The New American Poetry,
conceptualized the anthology as a challenge to academically-sanctioned verse by
culling a range of poets who shared the “total rejection of all those
qualities of academic verse.” 2
The anthology pushed to realign American poetic history around Charles Olson’s
conception of field composition—governed by the principles that “FORM IS
NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST
IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” —as detailed in his
“Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein.” 3 The structure of the anthology itself reinforces the
centrality of “Projective Verse” and its challenge by placing Olson’s
“The Kingfishers,” with its opening line “What does not change / is the
will to change,” as the first poem of the anthology.
The New American Poetry, in this regard, is a text organized around the
“will to change” poetry from the confines of formal verse as championed by
the New Critics into the explosive free-verse of Charles Olson and company. More
particularly, The New American Poetry
was a direct challenge to New Poets of
England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson,
which was first published in 1957 and reprinted in 1962.
The Hall, Pack, Simpson anthology was the assertion and culmination of
what Ron Silliman refers to as “Eurocentric closed verse form, 4
as emphasized by the title—New
Poets of England and America—whereby the lineage/tradition with British
literature is maintained. Moreover,
the poetry of the Hall et. al. anthology is an assembly of traditional verse
forms either as sonnets, sestinas, villanelles or poems that rely upon regular
rhyme patterns as discursive poetic strategies typified by the rhyming couplets
of Donald Hall’s “Marriage” wherein the subjective intimacy of the bedroom
is exposed to the reader’s gaze: “When in the bedded dark of night / I
touch your body huddled tight,” which yields “special knowledge then / That
crosses and will cross again.” 5 As Marjorie Perloff observes, In 1960, the Age Demanded that a poem be self-contained,
coherent, and unified: that it present, indirectly to be sure, a paradox,
oblique truth, or special insight, utilizing the devices of irony, concrete
imagery, symbolism, and structural economy. 6 Along
with its “special knowledge” partially (and voyeuristically) divulged from
the privacy of the bedroom, “Marriage” stresses craft above ideas.
Charles Altieri notes that the “emphasis on craft . . . produced a
highly inbred professionalism governing both the training of artists and the
judgment of their work.” 7
New Poets of England
and America further valorizes craft and professionalism in the introduction
to the anthology, written by the arch-champion of traditional verse, Robert
Frost, who regards the academy as fertile soil for the inception and reception
of poetry: As I often say, a thousand and, two thousand, colleges town
and gown together in the little town they make, give us the best audiences for
poetry ever had in all this world. I
am in on the ambition that this book will get to them—heart and mind. 8 Frost’s
narrative reifies Lowell’s depiction of the civilized readers digesting
civilized poetry within a “cultured” academic setting.
In this context, New Poets of England and America valorizes academic verse, which is
implicit in the title with its suggestion of the continuation of a literary
history and tradition wherein the poets collected are a “new” manifestation
of an established tradition. In contrast, the “new” of The New American Poetry
modifies poetry and emphasizes a
mode of poetics that breaks with history and its emphasis upon craft. The
challenge is, on the surface, an issue of new, antinominal poetics versus staid
literary tradition and continuity—the either/or conflict between the “raw”
and the “cooked,”
“projective-open poetry” and “closed-formal verse,” or poetry that can
be “studied” and poetry of “scandal.” These poetic groupings of “new
poets” versus “new poetry” are fueled by the tension that generates a
sense of collective belonging. Such tension signifies the crisis of post-1950s
American poetry, and explains the heated rhetoric and the militant patrolling of
the borders of each camp that manifest most distinctively as the official party
organ—the anthology. Given
this clash of poetic ideologies in and around the time of Robert Lowell’s
speech and the publication of The New
American Poetry, the question begs to be asked, what if a poet is not easily
grouped in either camp? Or, what if a poet displays attributes that belong to both
camps? After all, with such a
historical narrative of literary history where the world is split into either
the Robert Lowell-New Critical-Academics or the Charles
Olson-Projective-Non-Academics, what happens to a poet whose work defies the
categorical imperatives upon which a dialectic model of canon formation depends?
In other words, what happens to a poet like William Bronk, who doesn’t fall
neatly into the “us” or “them” camp but has characteristics of both?
While it is naïve to assume that the anthology is the representation of all
the worthwhile poetry of a particular period or thematic focus, yet an
anthology, even more so than the works of individual poets, is the integer of
major figures: a hierarchy is proposed that situates itself and its schematic
poetic structure in relation to literary history. The repercussions of not fitting into the prescribed roles
upon which the anthology depends is to be excluded from the dialogues of
literary history. To be passed over
by the anthology is to be silenced. In
this light, the case of William Bronk is particularly instructive. As
most readers of Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology are aware, William
Bronk is not included in the cast of poets assembled within The New American Poetry. But
what might be surprising to many is that Bronk was invited by Allen to
contribute to the anthology and he was the final person to be cut from the final
manuscript. On the 20th
of July, 1958, Allen wrote to Bronk that “Both [Robert] Creeley and [Cid]
Corman have urged me to ask you for poems” for an “anthology of modern
American poetry.” 9
In response to Allen’s invitation, Bronk sent him Light and Dark, the “little collection that Corman published in
’56.’” 10
Nine days later and at Allen’s encouragement, Bronk also sent his essay
“The Occupation of Space: Palenque” and other unnamed poems for
consideration in the Evergreen Review,
which Allen edited. (Incidentally,
no works of Bronk’s ever appeared in the Evergreen
Review despite a series of letters between Allen and Bronk.) In
terms of Allen’s editing of the final manuscript, Bronk was one of the seven
cut from the final manuscript—along with Judson Crews, Paul Goodman, Joanne
Kyger, David Lyttle, Jack Micheline, and Stan Persky—and according to the
dates on Allen’s rejection letters, Bronk was by far the final person cut. 11
As late as the 8th of September, 1959, Allen still intended to
include Bronk in what was to become the first part of
The New American Poetry, the “Origin/Black Mountain” section.12
Yet on the 29th of December, 1959, one week after making the
final editorial decisions for the manuscript, Allen wrote to Bronk remarking
that After struggling with the anthology for two years, I finally
got it into shape and found that I had to limit it drastically in scope.
In the end I was unable to include any of your work, much as I admire it.
I regret this very much. I am returning your Light
and Dark with this note and my best thanks. 13 The
gist of Allen’s editorial decision is left largely unexplained; i.e., how does
Bronk’s work not fit the shape and scope of Allen’s “vision.” Moreover, the specifics of Allen’s decision are not
addressed in either the collected Allen papers at the University of California,
San Diego Poetics Library or Bronk’s collected papers at Columbia University
Butler Library. Even more interesting, despite a period of correspondence throughout 1958 and 1959, neither Allen nor
Bronk recalled that they had ever corresponded; and when asked what he had sent,
Bronk seemed surprised since he did not recall that he even had been invited to
be part of The New American Poetry; 14
consequently, both the poems that Bronk sent in addition to Light
and Dark as well as the crux of Allen’s editorial decision remains a void
within the continuum of literary history. 15 The
gap in Bronk’s and Allen’s more recent memory of these events, though, is
perhaps symptomatic of cultural memory in that the exclusion from The New American Poetry created an aporia that drastically impacted
the inception and reception of William Bronk’s poetry.
The gap in Bronk’s and Allen’s memory is the “natural” result of
Bronk being relegated, in that moment of rejection, to the margins of
“major” poetry. Bronk’s absence in most subsequent anthologies that
followed in Allen’s wake is a “natural” extension of Allen’s earlier but
unarticulated decision. But because
of this seemingly definitive moment, where Bronk was almost amongst the now
canonical patriarchs of the 1960s, Bronk’s poetic cache is particularly
intriguing to the processes of canon formations and the closed and limited
network upon which history is construed. The
rationale for Bronk’s omission from The
New American Poetry should be fairly obvious to those familiar with
Allen’s famous anthology. First,
Allen organized the anthology into five more or less geographic communities:
Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the New York Poets,
and a fifth group with “no geographic definition,” although those poets tend
to be affiliated with the San Francisco Renaissance more so than any other
grouping. 16
Situated
in Hudson Falls, New York, William Bronk is clearly not a geographic member of
the Black Mountain group nor any of the others, although he published in the Black
Mountain Review. The geographic structure of “communities” of poets was
established in September 1959 in an exchange of letters between Allen and
Creeley, from which Allen adhered to Creeley’s suggestions for the
sections—although Creeley suggests seven with a section dedicated to the
“Patriarchs” of the anthology (Zukofsky, Olson, Rexroth, and Duncan) and
with the San Francisco Renaissance divided into an early and later period.
Originally, Allen had conceived of the anthology as a more “complete”
literary history that would have included the “first generation” of American
poets who established the foundation for poets of The New American Poetry: William Carlos Williams, H.D., e.e.
cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, who would be followed
by “Rexroth, Patchen, and Zukofsky.” 17
In this schema, the poets of The New
American Poetry would constitute the “third” generation of this
tradition. Such a structure would contextualize the anthology and legitimize it
within a poetic lineage that included the modern and high modern poets.
The anthology, conceived along these historic lines, would present an
alternative literary history with distinctive American roots as opposed to a
British centered poetic tradition of New
Poets of England and America. Charles
Olson, though, quashed the idea of including the “Patriarchs” section,
remarking that I
wouldn’t myself add either of those two units: either the ‘aunties’ or the
grandpas. If the thing we are now in is just in its own character, and there
isn’t one of us who isn’t bound together in that way, than by any of those
older connections. In fact those connections strike me as smudging the point;
1950 on. [sic throughout] 18 Allen
says of Olson’s remark that “That decided it for me; I would concentrate on
the new poets . . .” 19
In
essence, Olson wished to divorce contemporary poetry from the “old” and
thereby valorize its “newness.” An
extended historical view might undermine the explicit agenda of proposing a
“fresh” image of poetry, which was clearly the task that Olson as well as
other poets who played a large part in shaping the anthology had envisioned.
For example, Allen Ginsberg, in a letter dating May 1958, described
Allen’s anthology as a great bomb . . . [that would] clear
the air almost immediately of all the doubting critical bullshit—most of the
material will come as a complete surprise to a place say like the English
depart[ment] at Columbia—or people like Simpson (silent gener) & Timbimatu
(ignorant preface to new New World Writing poetry selection . . . was just dumb
statements about prissy lifeless poetry.) There have been a few anthologies of
young US poetry lately & not one of them has introduced anything new—here
you have this tremendous goldmine to unload all at once—should be a historic
piece of publishing . . . . Maybe save the world! 20 The
thrust of The New American Poetry was
to challenge traditional verse—what Ginsberg calls “prissy lifeless
poetry”—under the banner of “Projective Verse.”
If Olson’s “Projective Verse” is the fetishized paradigm of the
“new,” then certainly in comparison, Bronk’s work with its more-or-less
regular line lengths—usually iambic pentameter—and the “normal”
appearance of the poem upon the page in uniform stanzas falls within the suspect
category of the “old” and academic. Bronk’s
work lacks the explosive visual excess of “open” verse, and his poetry was
“digestible” for the academic palate, which is confirmed by the fact that
some of his early poems appeared in the New
Yorker and Poetry as well as Origin and the Black Mountain
Review. For
example, Bronk’s “The Marches Upstate,” collected in The World, The Worldless (1964) but first published in The
New Yorker in 1949, shares more with “closed” poetry than the thrust of
Olson’s field by composition. The
final two stanzas of the poem read Road-gashed, it is road-gashed and
wire-strung. What green, what
sun, shall flesh and warm the flesh? Loved
land, unlovely, none can fit you,
for you have no shape. Mirror in March my human
face. (LS 51) Composed
in five uniform stanzas of three lines, the poem is structured around a number
of slant rhymes such as “gashed” and “flesh”; “fit” and “face”;
“shape” and “face”; and “gashed” and “green.”
While not a regular rhyme pattern, the poem suggests “closed”
tendencies, and in the early 1950s, Olson contemptuously and suspiciously
regarded Bronk as a “neo-classicist” (although he would later revise his
opinion in 1957 in response to The World,
The Worldless). Furthermore
Olson remarked to Cid Corman that “I am so sick of this sort of thing you show
me from Bronk—the green of it, the green-sick, too—the bad-headedness, as
well as the manners . . .” 21
The key term to Olson’s dismissal is “manners”—a socially coded word
that locates Bronk within the genteel “neo-classicist” tradition that smacks
of Robert Lowell’s depiction of “cooked” poetry. Olson’s assessment of
Bronk as poetically other—the “enemy” of the “New” poetry—certainly
may have influenced Allen’s decision to exclude Bronk although no evidence
exists that might corroborate such a claim.
Nevertheless, clearly Bronk was regarded as neither “projective” nor
“new” enough and, therefore, not suitable for New
American Poetry. The
difference between the poetics of Bronk and Olson helps to explain Bronk’s
exclusion from The New American Poetry,
but his exclusion needs to be considered within another context that clearly
supercedes “aesthetic” considerations—the socio-political nature of canon
building. That is, the first section of the anthology was to be the “Black
Mountain/Origin” section—and
neither Bronk nor Corman are included in the New
American Poetry. After all,
Corman considered the two poles of the magazine to be himself and Bronk—and
not the “Black Mountain” poets. As
he remarks, Against
[Bronk’s] fixedness in Hudson Falls has been my movement around the world, so
that Origin has had both the specific
gravity of the local and the scope of the larger world community. 22
Bronk
was an anchor around which Corman’s poetry and translations “ revolved.”
More, “Bronk . . . is clearly . . . the thread that binds all the
issues together.” 23
Turning to Origin, Bronk’s “Some Musicians Play Chamber Music For Us”
appeared in the first issue and then “The Acts of the Apostles” and “My
Father Photographed with Friends” were published in the Fall 1951 issue of Origin
(#3) and his work appeared in 13 of the 20 issues, including a Bronk “special
issue” (January 1969) and two poems in the final issue (January 1971).
Subsequently, to not include Bronk in the Black Mountain/Origin section
of The New American Poetry was not to
represent the “gist” of Origin; yet
to exclude Corman from the anthology was to disavow Origin altogether. Nevertheless, Allen did not cut
Corman, who had served as a very important advisor from the inception of the
anthology to its completion. Rather,
Corman asked to be removed for professional reasons: Would
you do me a kindness and omit me from your anthology?
I realise I have signed a contract and if the book is well on its way
toward being published, I dont want to spoil it for you—but I am convinced
that neither you nor Rosset has any genuine interest in my work.
And I am not at all in sympathy with EVERGREEN REVIEW or Grove’s
policies in choice of material or in dealing with writers. [sic throughout] 24 Bronk
was still considered for the final version of The
New American Poetry six months after Corman’s “resignation,” 25
so
Corman’s “revolt” against “Grove’s policies in choice of material or
in dealing with writers” was not a response to Bronk’s exclusion.
Corman’s vision, though, seems prophetic in hindsight in that it
anticipates how Bronk would be treated. Nevertheless,
the severing of Corman, the only other person who might have bridged Bronk and
“Projective Poetry,” made Bronk’s position within a manuscript bound by
its “anti-closed” poetry stance tentative and awkward. In
terms of poetics, Corman’s poetry clearly parallels Bronk’s. For example,
Corman’s “I Have Come Far to Have Found Nothing” shares much with Bronk: I have come far to have found nothing or to
have found that what was found was
only to be lost, lost finally in that absence whose trace
is silence.25
The
poetics of interrogation and statement as well as the ideational content echoes
the thrust of Bronk’s work. Consider
the above against the ending of Bronk’s “Loew’s World”: This
unreality is one we know: the
actual is no more real than this. I turn
in my seat for the reassurance of you, your
substance which is there. Wanting a
land for our
weather, a world of solid shapes, not one
the light made, we think to leave,—for
where? (LS 53) Clearly,
Corman and Bronk are working from similar poetic and philosophical perspectives.
But given the above two poems, now consider a more direct and narrative
passages in Olson, such as this one from “Maximus, To Himself”: I have
made dialogues, have
discussed ancient texts, have
thrown what light I could, offered what
pleasures doceat
allows
But the known? This, I
have had to be given, a life,
love, and from one man the world. 26 As
an ideational pivot, Corman suggests a bridge between Olson and Bronk by
emphasizing how a poetry of statement and ideas—such as Bronk’s—is a mode
of open poetic inquiry. Further, to
quote some other lines from “Loew’s World” that speak to the parallels
between these passages from Olson, Corman, and Bronk, “We / are disturbed to
find so much similitude” (LS 53), especially between two poets who have been
scripted by literary history as drastically and poetically different from one
another—Olson and Bronk. To
complicate the issue a bit more, The New
American Poetry includes Helen Adam’s rigorously structured “I Love My
Love” that, despite its epigraph from Robert Duncan, is more poetically Other
than any of Bronk’s poetry. The
opening stanza of Adam’s poem reads, There
was a man who married a maid. She
laughed as he led her home. The
living fleece of her long bright hair she combed with a golden comb. He
led her home through his barley fields where the saffron poppies grew. She
combed and whispered, “I love my love.”
Her voice like a plaintive coo. Ha! Ha! Her voice like a
plaintive coo. 27 The
poem follows this structure through fourteen stanzas, and in retrospect seems
more likely to have been lifted from the Pack, Simpson, Hall anthology than
Allen’s. Certainly the inclusion of “I Love My Love” disrupts the
“open” poetic agenda. Adam’s
epigraph from Duncan is key, though, to the inclusion of the poem and sheds
light upon the direct effect of poetic communities upon anthology making—as
well as the inclusion of Adam’s “closed” poem and the exclusion of Bronk
that obviously extends beyond poetics. Allen apparently changed his selection of
Adam’s poetry to “I Love My Love” at the pressure of Robert Duncan, who
was Adam’s advocate during the time when the anthology was being collected.
Adam’s affiliation with Duncan, therefore, superceded the overarching
projective poetics of the anthology, and the creation of the anthology, in this
light, is contingent upon a network of poets—a point that is not surprising
given the fact that the anthology was shaped from its beginning by
recommendations of poets provided by poets. Subsequently,
Corman’s indignant and brusque removal of himself from The
New American Poetry may have impacted Bronk’s position, who, therefore,
not only lacked the critical link between his poetry and the projective
tradition but also lost a strong advocate; consequently, his position within a
community of poets bound by their dogmatic rallying around projective verse
became even more marginal and less tenable. As Marjorie Perloff notes, “The
difference—and this happens in canon making (even counter canon making) all
the time, has to do with particular literary and cultural affiliations.” 28
Or,
more relevant to The New American Poetry,
one’s affiliation with other poets is the difference. In a letter to
Charles Olson, Bronk writes about this in a revealing and personal way: I
dont [sic] think I am just crying on your shoulder about my personal neglect
though it must sound so. But I find
the whole problem interesting. I
know, of course, that one should not—no rather can not as a practical
matter—expect one poet to really much like the work of another—not a
contemporary’s anyway—even though I also know that an immense amount of
poetic politics in the way of logrolling and mutual back scratching, pretending
to like each other supports the whole poetry industry in the US today. 29 The
politics of poetry—as “logrolling” and “mutual back scratching”—is
certainly evident in the construction of The
New American Poetry, and without anyone supporting Bronk’s poetry, his
position within the “industry” is certainly precarious—precipitating his
eventual absence, silence, and marginalization. The
predominant and governing issue of The New
American Poetry is collective identity as emphasized in Allen’s letter to
Creeley where he asks “Where to place Judson Crews in this kind of
[geographic/school] arrangement?” 30
Without the tethers that linked Bronk with the community of The
New American Poetry—namely, the “patriarchs” and Cid Corman—the same
question might be asked of Bronk. Interestingly
enough, Creeley’s reply to Allen simply omits Crews in the list of poets for
the anthology, and he remarks that within the “Origin/Black Mountain
Section” that “Bronk is marginal, more Stevens than anything.” 31
Creeley’s statement, though, should be read in a more generous light of
literary history since he is not proclaiming that Bronk is a marginal poet, especially
since Creeley’s career dictates otherwise: he published Bronk in Black
Mountain Review; originally recommended him to be part of
The New American Poetry; dedicated a poem to Bronk (“Echoes” in Windows
[1990]); served on the panel that awarded Bronk the National Book Award in 1982
for Life Supports; and in his memorial
to Bronk (February 25, 1999) states that “Finally, there was no one else quite
like him, so large in his singleness, so separate yet enclosing. One will not
see his like again.” 32
Rather,
in 1959 Creeley perceives Bronk as marginal to the thrust of The
New American Poetry because of the unique problem of his
singleness—neither us nor them. Bronk doesn’t fit, and in this way, he
challenges the governing fiction of the anthology as a concerted, unified
effort. Such
singleness, despite its power, is problematic especially in relation to
anthology formations. As Giorgio Agamben remarks in a political language that
can easily be translated into the canon-formation processes of anthologies, For
the State, therefore, what is important is never singularity as such, but only
its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the whatever
itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to
terms with.) 33
As
Golding remarks, “The stress on community [by Olson and Origin] provides a way to propose a collective alternative
canon that stands more chance of being taken seriously than the work of isolated
poets.” 34
The emphasis upon collectivity—clustered around the paradigm of
Olson—supercedes individual effort since so much was at stake in the debate
between open and closed poetry. Within the context of the collective identity of The
New American Poetry, the inclusion of Bronk might have introduced a poetic confrontation
and called into question the simplified binary upon which the anthology was
founded—academic vs. anti-academic, closed vs. open, and cooked vs.
raw—although that binary is still present in the figure of Helen Adam. Since
Bronk defies the accuracy of such categorical imperatives, his position is
questionable. But even more
importantly than aesthetic difference, since he doesn’t have anyone claiming
that he is part of that collective—Creeley’s disavowal being the final
judgment—he is not included. The
same rationale, of course, applies to Bronk’s exclusion from the
“academic,” “cooked” anthologies such as The
New Poets of America and England, even though Bronk fulfilled the criteria
established by the editors for the anthology: he was born between 1917 and 1935
(Bronk was born in 1918); he was working from a more traditional poetry
background that gestured back to Shakespearean sonnets as poetic and thematic
sources; and he was a student of Robert Frost while at Dartmouth. Bronk’s
inclusion and his less than rigid poetry would have implicitly undermined the
argument of the collective identity of the “new” poets.
By doing so, he would have called into question the homogeneity of the
anthology—a homogeneity that was desired and presented in both the Hall, Pack,
and Simpson anthology as well as in Donald Allen’s. As Golding notes One
of [Allen’s] much debated, and constantly changing organization was to
minimize these differences—to create, as he put it in an August 1959 letter to
Creeley, ‘a tentative arrangement which would have some meaning and also avoid pointless confrontations’” [Golding’s emphasis]
35 A
structure that presented a collected front would generate “meaning,” and
“pointless confrontations” were to be avoided because the collective whole
was more important than individual egos. The
case of William Bronk demonstrates that while an aesthetic model of
“newness” may be the driving impetus for an anthology, canons, ultimately,
are contingent upon a presumed collective identity. The anthology always bears
the imprint of identity. “The collection becomes the sign of collectivity; the
display case and the aesthetic isolation of the pedestal certify the community
value of belonging.” 36
Further, To
be a recognized poet in the early sixties was necessarily to be a pawn in some
armchair quarterback’s version of the Battle of the Anthologies, and the
Anthologies in question were specially Allen’s and the Hall-Pack-Simpson one
in its two editions. 37 The
“arm chair quarterbacks” included poets (Hall and Simpson) for The New Poets of England and America, and in the case of The
New American Poetry, the central “editor” was not Allen but a congery of
poets: according to an unpublished letter by Robert Duncan to the editor of The
San Francisco Chronicle, the poetic force behind The New American Poetry was Olson,
Creeley, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Blaser, Jones, and Schuler. 38
These were not “arm-chair quarterbacks” but poets of substance and
“rank.” To be a recognized
poet, to revise Rasula’s description, was to be recognized by poets who
were, seemingly, united in their efforts to propose a group identity and set of
cultural values. Allen, as
evidenced by the various letters between himself and his poetry “advisors,”
was the medium, the messenger, for the “New” poetry. In
terms of The New American Poetry,
Bronk was not granted the status of “belonging” to the arrival of the new:
his work was not regarded as “open” or “projective” enough, and without
an advocate such as Cid Corman, his poetry conflicted with the “new” poetic
identity that Allen’s anthology advances despite its disturbing
“similitude” with aspects of Charles Olson’s work. As The
New American Poetry suggests, the battle for a space in the 1960s American
poetry landscape was fierce. And in order for the “new” to shake off all
vestiges of the “old” in order to claim such a space, it seemed justifiable
to place under erasure important poetry from less than marginal poets such as
William Bronk—poets who were not elected as either “us” or “them.”
Part II
The Will to
Change?
[T]here
is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point:
beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable
what follows from them. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
(The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”) While
focusing upon William Bronk’s exclusion from The New American Poetry may seem to be merely attempting to revise
literary history by arguing against the socio-ideological/aesthetic dictates of
Allen’s editorial policy—a move that has been a standard critical maneuver
in canonical debates over the last twenty years or more—in fact, William Bronk
offers an intriguing lens to consider how the history of poetry crystallized
around the “raw” and “cooked” binary and, moreover, how Allen’s poetry
anthology/canon became sacrosanct—the “beginning” of one strain of
twentieth-century American poetry. Allen’s poetic vision was the definitive
force in shaping the canons of poetry since 1960, and Bronk’s exclusion from
that “vision” has proven to be prophetic in relation to Bronk’s future.
The “new” poetry of Allen’s anthology radically challenged the singularity
of the “new critical” canon—so much so that eventually New American Poetry figures such as Creeley, Duncan, Levertov,
Ginsberg, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Snyder were included by one of their original
arch-nemesis, Donald Hall, in his anthology Contemporary
American Poetry (1962; revised 1972). Furthermore, many of those same poets
found themselves embraced by the very institution that they were rebelling
against—the academy—and were offered university positions. The
anti-academics had become academics; and the raw became acceptable for
“consumption” in graduate seminars because of a poetic paradigm shift
indebted to The New American Poetry. Despite
the “broadening” of the canon, Bronk remains peripheral and is included in
only a handful of anthologies: The New
Yorker Book of Poems (1969), a collection of 900 poems that appeared in The
New Yorker between 1925 and 1969 and includes the “cooked” along with
such “raw” poets as David Antin, Paul Blackburn, Kathleen Fraser, Allen
Ginsberg, George Oppen, Charles Tomlinson, and Diane Wakosi; Hayden Carruth’s The
Voice that is Great within Us (1970), a huge anthology that bridges the open
and the closed and is dedicated, as emphasized in the introduction, to “the
remarkable diversity of forms, the ability [of poetry] to find strength within
itself for successive waves of renewal and change”; 39
Cid Corman’s The Gist of Origin (1975), that presents Bronk’s inclusion within
such an “oral” tradition; Edward Field’s A
Geography of Poets: An Anthology of
the New Poetry (1979) in which Field “tried to show the enormous variety
of poetry today from the vernacular to the formal . . .” and where Bronk is
touted as a poet “with ideas about life”; 40
Eliot
Weinberger’s Innovators and Outsiders: American Poetry Since 1950 (1993) that
argues that in “a society where all poets are outsiders, most of the poets
here are, or have been, outside the outside.
All of them are innovators, those who made it new, amidst the more
visible legions of renovators, those who make it like new;” 41
and most recently Cary Nelson’s Anthology
of Modern American Poetry (2000) that is a presentation of
“twentieth-century American poetry in its astonishing and endless energetic
variety.” 42 With
the exception of Weinberger, who is accurate in his portrayal of Bronk as
outside the outside, 43
all
of these anthologies claim to represent the diversity of poetry.
While it is not my intention to critique the supposed “democratic”
editorial visions of these authors, it is of interest that when an
ideologically-driven aesthetic program as well as a strict identity-centered
poetic-politics are (seemingly) abandoned, Bronk is regarded as an anthology
worthy poet. Yet, these six anthologies constitute only a small portion of the
over 100 poetry anthologies published since 1950. 44
Further, most of the poetry anthologies, unlike the six that include Bronk,
reify and repeat the division of poetic communities asserted in and by Allen’s
The New American Poetry and the Pack, Hall, and Simpson
New Poets of England and America.[1]
Canon debates have not moved beyond the arguments of the “open” versus the
“closed” even as each subsequent anthology slightly reshuffles the deck with
some poets awarded “cross-over” status. Subsequently, the last fifty years
have mostly repeated the original binary with slight modifications, and
essentially this has disallowed the inclusion of Bronk—among others—who were
removed from the original debate. The
most blatant example of the reification of the “new” tradition while making
it more “current” is The Postmoderns:
The New American Poetry Revised, edited by Donald Allen and George Butterick
(1982), which cuts fifteen poets from the original New American Poetry (Paul Carroll, Helen Adam, James Broughton,
Madeline Gleason, Richard Duerden, Philip Lamantia, Bruce Boyd, Kirby Doyle,
Ebbe Borregaard, Peter Orlovsky, Edward Field, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stuart Z.
Perkoff, Edward Marshall, and Ray Bremser—none of which, incidentally, were
ever in danger of not being included in the original anthology) and adds
nine new poets to The Postmoderns
(Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, Diane di Prima, Anselm Hollo. Joanne Kyger,
Robert Kelly, James Koller, Ed Sanders, and Anne Waldman). As the sub-title
suggests, The New American Poetry Revised
(my emphasis), the new anthology is a continuation of the old only with the
field more finely-tuned. That is, Allen and Butterick deleted writers who proved
in historical hindsight not to be “new” enough to be major and then added
poets who had become active or whose influence was felt after the
1960s. They were not so much hard on the heels of the older writers as in step
with them throughout the 1960s, and so logically and readily belong here. 45 Of
the original seven cut, only Joanne Kyger has been re-evaluated and reinstated
since her “presence” was finally “felt” in the early 1980s.
Still a number of gaps are readily apparent in the anthology, and
Marjorie Perloff goes so far as to offer a list of Donald Allen should-have-beens, in that they were excluded
from the second gathering largely by fluke, belonging by rights to the congeries
already represented. These eight are David Antin, William Bronk, John Cage,
Clayton Eshelman, Ronald Johnson, Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser, and
Nathaniel Tarn. 46 Apparently
in 1982, Bronk’s “influence” still had to be felt, despite the fact that
Bronk’s collected poems, Life Supports,
was awarded a National Book Award in 1982, and that Charles Olson, the great
patriarch and canon-shaper of The New
American Poetry, had proclaimed in 1964 that in response to his reading of The
World, The Worldless, “I may have, for the first time in my life, imagined
a further succinct life” (quoted on the front dust jacket flap of the original
North Point edition of Life Supports
as well as included in the original press packet put together by New Directions
for The World, The Worldless). Nevertheless, in 1982, Bronk still was
not perceived as in “step with” the “older writers” (now
“patriarchs”) that had defined the field. The Postmoderns streamlined the
“tradition” by strengthening its core poets—paring away the “weak”
ones—and thereby reinforcing the literary historical merit (and prophetic
accuracy) of The New American Poetry
by showing how “fundamental” Allen’s original configuration had proved to
be. 47 Allen’s original editorial
efforts proved to be extremely successful in generating an alternative canon,
and The Postmoderns sought to repeat
the earlier success of The New American
Poetry while taking seemingly fewer risks.
Like any sequel, once the formula proves to be successful, it becomes
more and more difficult to deviate from its own prescribed boundaries;
subsequently, the script remains the same, but a few of the characters and terms
are altered to suggest both continuity and freshness.
In The Postmoderns, the stock
characters remain in place and a new term is superimposed upon “Projective
Verse”—“Postmodernism.” Allen’s
and Butterick’s definition of “postmodern” at the close of their preface
to The Postmoderns seems ironic,
though, given the “closed” and rigid definitions of what constitutes a
“postmodern” poem. “Most of all, [postmodernism’s] chief characteristic
is its inclusiveness, its quick willingness to take advantage of all that had
gone before.” 48
Inclusiveness, as previously discussed, has been the predominant
characteristic of those anthologies that have attempted to represent a range of
poetries and which have included Bronk. Apparently,
the definition does not apply to postmodern canons and anthologies, but is,
rather, characteristic of a poetic mode: the postmodern poem is
“revolutionary” in that the poet seeks a new relation toward his or her world, a new ‘stance toward
reality,’ where each poem’s line, whether long-breathed or tightly
controlled, is open to its own possibility, where the syntax responds with vital
immediacy to the moment’s pulse. 49 Postmodernism,
defined in such terms, reiterates Olson’s principles of composition by field
nearly thirty years after the fact, although those principles are masked now in
a dispassionate academic style and tone. The
inclusiveness Allen and Butterick gesture toward, therefore, is contingent upon
the paradigm of an Olsonian poetics, and again, those who do not fit within the
original polemic established in The New American Poetry (regardless of the narrowness of that
definition and the need to “revise” and include/exclude others) do not have
the distinction of being “postmodern” enough for The Postmoderns. 50 Clearly,
The Postmoderns is derivative of its
predecessor, and the strict adherence to the governing
ideational-poetical-political structure of The
New American Poetry is not surprising since The Postmoderns is the updated version of The New American Poetry. But what is surprising is how
the same rigid distinctions that govern Allen’s anthologies have been
appropriated and naturalized by most “alternative” anthologies since The
Postmoderns, and how slight those anthologies have deviated from the
literary history proposed by Allen. Even
Cid Corman, in his The Gist of Origin
(1975), seems to have succumbed to the force of the New
American Poetry since his anthology disavows its own history—becoming
merely a pale echo of Origin the magazine—in order to propose a literary history more in
line with a one-sided poetic history centered around Olson.
The
Origin of the1950s and 1960s was, in
fact, more eclectic than programmatic, and Corman described his overarching
editorial philosophy as being devoted
to giving adequate outlet to
those new/unknown writers who
have shown maturity/insight into
their medium
to giving the
push to creative minds, to demonstrate
the going concerns, di rections
of contemporary
creativity
51 As
opposed to a mere polemic realignment of taste, Origin
was a window for recognizing and studying the nuances and directions in
contemporary poetry. For this
reason, Corman began “offering work by writers, no matter their age or even if
long dead, who seemed to me ‘alive’ and inadequately, if at all known in
America.” 52
This editorial policy is repeated in a 1994 interview with Corman as well
when he remarks that Origin
meant most in giving me a chance to present the best new work/new poets that
came my way (& I went out looking for them, not waiting), poets of no
particular movement or trend, but for the freshness and savor of their work. 53
Some
of the poets published in Origin,
subsequently, were the passed-over “patriarchs” (Stevens, Zukofsky, and
William Carlos Williams) as well as other figures considered but excluded from The
New American Poetry—Ted Enslin and Lorine Niedecker, to name the two most
prominent examples aside from Bronk. In
this sense, Origin was less affected
and constrained by the ideological issues that circumscribed the American poetry
scene. Moreover,
the first issue of Origin offers a
rather interesting and diverse pastiche of poets that are representative of both
“open” and “closed” verse. Olson, Creeley, and Williams are “open”
poets; Morse, Emerson, Hoskins, Hatson, Eberhart, and Bronk work in “closed”
verse—although such a labeling of Bronk as “closed” is narrow.
In this light, Origin was not merely a “projective verse” vehicle, but was in
fact a “coherently shaped dialogue between a central and a marginal
poetics.” 54
The
editorial scope for Origin was much
broader (at least as suggested by its earlier manifestations) than its current
mythic image, and Origin in the 1950s
reveals Corman’s sustained efforts to clear a space where Projective Verse
could be placed in dialogue with more “mainstream” poetry. 55
Yet,
what became embedded in cultural memory was not the dialogue initiated in and by
Origin—as weighted and perhaps fixed as it was in favor of
Olson—but rather the sustained recognition of the validity of
“projective” poets that The Gist of Origin reifies. Certainly Corman himself contributed to
the image of Origin as a vehicle of
“projective” verse; for example, in the introduction to a special issue of Contact
(1952) focused upon the works of Olson, Bronk, and Morse, Corman proclaims that
Olson is “the key figure” behind his magazine’s poetics—thereby placing
Bronk and Morse within a projective verse tradition. 56
Furthermore, the centrality of Olson was not merely a
“retrospective” gesture but rather the original impetus for the magazine. In
a letter to Olson, Nov. 6, 1950, Corman remarks,
“I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that all the work I’ve
accepted for inclusion for #1 [of Origin] is PROJECTIVE.” 57
The advancement of projective poetry was a central motive behind Origin,
but that advancement was to be contextualized within a larger arena of poetries
that accentuates points of comparison and contrast. That
dialogue as well as poetries disappears in Corman’s The Gist of Origin. The anthology includes no poetry by Morse,
Hoskins, Everson, Hatson, Eberhart, Wilbur, and Merrill.
Gone is the center, in other words, against which the “projective” is
to be read. Furthermore,
despite the fact that poems by or essays about Wallace Stevens are included in
five issues of Origin, only one poem,
Wallace Stevens’s “Long and Sluggish Lines,” is included in the anthology;
and Samuel French Morse, a staple of the first series of Origin,
is represented in the anthology only in the Appendix (II), “Major Works Not
Utilized,” which mentions Morse’s essay “The Motive for Metaphor” from
issue number five of the first series. 58
Morse’s poetry is all but denied.
While The Gist of Origin was
published in 1975, fifteen years after The
New American Poetry, it is difficult not to read Corman’s
“realignment” of Origin in
response to the precedent of Allen’s anthology and the literary history it
helped to establish. Origin (and not
its revised anthologized doppelganger that reads with a few key exceptions such
as Bronk, Zukofsky, Enslin, Niedecker, and others, as the shadow of The New American Poetry) was an important moment in literary history
because it attempted to fuse together two crowds that regarded each other as the
enemy. The image of Origin that is
reified by The Gist of Origin is not
one of dialogue but the programmatic hierarchy of “open” poetics over the
“closed.” In this light, The Gist of
Origin bridges the content of Allen’s The
New American Poetry and The
Postmoderns, but it is also symptomatic of a trend that continues into the
1990s as evidenced by Paul Hoover’s Postmodern
American Poetry (1994) and Douglas Messerli’s From the Otherside of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990
(1994)—namely, the unquestioned status of Donald Allen’s canon, and the fact
that both anthologies are admittedly and self-consciously derivative of The
New American Poetry and The
Postmoderns. Perhaps
predictably, neither anthology, like its ancestral father, The
New American Poetry, includes the poetry of William Bronk. Hoover
not only re-enacts the ideological impetus of The
New American Poetry by arguing that “this anthology shows that avant-garde
poetry endures in its resistance to mainstream ideology,” 59
he reifies the centrality of Olson by placing him first in the anthology (both
in the poetry and poetics sections). Furthermore, Hoover explicitly designates
Olson as the originator of “postmodernism” as a concept, and the
introduction to Postmodern American Poetry begins “The poet Charles Olson used the
word ‘postmodern’ as early as an October 20, 1951, letter to Creeley from
Black Mountain, North Carolina.” 60
Hoover’s anthology, thereby, synthesizes Allen’s New
American Poetry and The Postmoderns
in terms of structure (i.e., poetry and a separate poetics sections), ideational
tautology (“projective” poetry is “postmodern” poetry), and,
cumulatively, the post-1950s/postmodern poetry tradition that does not
deviate from the canon established by Allen.
Douglas
Messerli’s From the Other Side of the
Century also draws upon The New
American Poetry as the paradigm par excellence: The
model for most of us has been Donald Allen’s groundbreaking The
New American Poetry, published in 1960, but no major volume has served our
own generation . . . 61 From the Other Side
is an extension and updated revision (the revised “revision” of The Postmoderns) of The New
American Poetry with the emphasis falling upon the shoulders of Olson. Even
though Olson’s position of authority in From
the Other Side is dispersed among a range of other poets, most of whom are
central figures in The New American Poetry
(Ginsberg, Duncan, Spicer) as well as the Objectivist poets overlooked by Allen
as pre-Olson, the patriarchs and “aunties” (Reznikoff, Niedecker, Rakosi,
Oppen, and Zukofsky). Despite the
democratizing of the hierarchy of importance with Olson sharing the position of
power among others, Olson’s position of importance is asserted rhetorically by
the title of the anthology, a point that is reinforced by the first epigraph for
the anthology, which are lines from Olson’s The
Maximus Poems: “. . . from the other side of time, from a time / on the
other side of yourself.” 62
While avoiding the critical (and academic) apparatus of Hoover and before
him Butterick and Allen, Messerli maintains that the time of the anthology, the
time of “our generation” that this volume serves, is the “other side” of
Olson, his “self” that marks the beginning of twentieth-century poetic time.
Olson, while being surrounded by a collection of others, remains the
poetic gauge of the anthology, and From
the Other Side, like Hoover’s anthology, is an expanded echo of The
New American Poetry. Marjorie
Perloff and Jed Rasula both have discussed the “belatedness” and
“buttressing” of the Hoover and Messerli anthologies in relation to The New American Poetry. Rasula
caustically observes that In the case of these anthologists [Weinberger, Messerli, and
Hoover], it is a nostalgia predicated on a “recuperation” of New American
poetic dissidents, but the logic is flawed because they’ve come too late to
get in on the fruits of first acclaim. All
aspire to huddle with Donald Allen . . . 63 In a more generous reading,
Golding remarks that Among
the editors of these recent anthologies, Weinberger and Hoover especially apply
a center-margin model in their representations of post-World War II American
poetry, in a way that openly derives from Allen’s New American Poetry . . . . [Yet] Weinberger, Hoover, and Messerli,
unlike Allen, are engaged not just in presenting new work but in historicizing
its precedents. . . . [a] buttressing [that] involves far more than mere
repetition . . . 64
When elements are repeated—as the textual assertion of Olson as |