Dale Smith

 

New College of California in in the 1990s

First, a little history: any discussion of the Poetry and Poetics of the 1990s for me begins on the West Coast and, particularly, in San Francisco, where I had enrolled in the now defunct Poetics Program of the New College of California in 1994 (Hoa entered the MFA program in Poetics a year earlier). I was reading Ron Silliman and Robert Creeley at the time, feeling a sense of liberation, learning that even a young white kid from Texas could somehow acknowledge his experience in writing—or find ways to write outside the field of that experience—to encounter the intersectional realities enlivened by poetry. Silliman was probably the first author to really help me understand the

1 Some of the critical terms in this essay I take from Raymond Williams, particularly from his Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. He helps articulate the social and literary structures that enable communities of meaning, like those formed by small presses, to adhere in diverse cultural settings.

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_2 New College was founded in 1971 and emphasized social justice, Humanities, and psychology; it was located at 777 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco, and ceased operations in 2008. Duncan McNaughton established the Poetics Program in 1980 with Louis Patler. Robert Duncan soon became a committed teacher in the

Program, fulfilling the demands of what he termed “a master teacher,” according to Lisa Jarnot (189). Aaron Shurin and David Levi-Straus attended the program in the eighties where Bay-Area poets like Diane di Prima, Michael Palmer, Joanne Kyger, and others taught occasionally throughout its existence. For insight into Duncan McNaughton’s work at New College and an appreciation of

The poets on the faculty would teach an author course or a context course, focusing on a different period each semester. I remember in spring 1995 taking a seminar with Tom Clark on Charles Olson and another with Lyn Hejinian on Gertrude Stein. David Meltzer in that same semester would teach the social history of modernism, with emphasis on West Coast social activism and the early twentieth-century labor movement. There were other semesters that focused on the Early Modern period, Romanticism, and the American nineteenth century. Of keen significance was Gloria Frym’s yearlong editorial course devoted to the publication of New College’s poetry journal, Prosodia. It was my first experience editing a magazine. I worked with co-editors Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, Cliff Gassoway, and Leslie Davis to produce issue 5 (1995), with a cover by Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat and new writing by Alice Notley, Rae Armantrout, Kevin Killian, John Yau, Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, Anselm Berrigan, and Will Alexander. Gloria’s mentorship was crucial. She had studied with Creeley in New Mexico and brought a fine sense of the history and obligations of editing poetry to us at the time. It was important for her that we shape and give meaning to a community of writers and readers. In a quite practical sense, she also helped us contact poets for work, and we were grateful for the opportunity to learn the responsibilities of publication, ranging from solicitation and editing to print layout, production, distribution, and promotion of a literary journal.

sentence and how to separate the self from language and from the phenomenal reality of one’s perceptions. So, I came with this specific bent to the Program when I enrolled in Lyn Hejinian’s fall course offering in literary theory, “The Language of Paradise.” Other faculty included Gloria Frym, Adam Cornford, the late David Meltzer, and the volatile Tom Clark, who taught from his home in Berkeley, California. These poets brought specific histories, social and creative outlooks, and at times intense pedagogical conflicts to life in their courses. Unlike the creative writing programs that have grown up now all across North America, the Poetics Program was designed so that each semester poet-scholars led students in a specific period of study; we were asked to examine the complex social relationships that make poetry possible in specific geographic contexts and historical periods. Students encountered the legacy of “master teacher” Robert Duncan, whose contributions in the 1980s helped establish the program’s unique, pedagogical outlook, and we received accreditation thanks to the labor and advocacy of Duncan McNaughton, Louis Patler, and others who were involved in the formal establishment of the Poetics Program.2___________________________________________I love
this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his___________________________________________I love

this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___with Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or

__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality? unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___with Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or
__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality?

___________________________________________I love
this poet Pasolini and want to___um__Nov. 2 is the 50th anniversary
of his unsolved murder___and I think about
___________that often___that no one has solved this man’s murder
___________T brought me a second copy of Divine Mimesis
___wit

h Leslie’s ex libris stamp__pages are falling out of my copy
I put them next to each other___one Italian lesson in Chicago and several
Arabic__headache worse post-Stefano___“flirt
__________________with Zoraida__I say that because your speaking is angular
__seduce her!”__wait is he acknowledging that I’m the queer here or
__do Italians just want to seduce everyone with their musicality?