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.

________________________________________________________________

_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?

Robin Blaser

Image Nation 19 (Wand

I have told many things and want to tell more in a small time    to count far off,  since 'nothing distinguishes me  ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world'  simply             and 'we drift together toward  the noise and the black depths of the universe'      celebrate the  sudden hang-up of our visibility,  celebrate the sudden beauty that is not ourselves     careless   unwrapped (ducis)   the solar origin drifts  in the same boat                               what did dance in this dancer     was first the difference among poppies and  white horses of advertisements, the snow-storm and the grapes from Africa     and the smile, exactly  and repetitions, but joyous, wintering  in Sais, writing memorable letters out  of the shattered various crystals, rocks, grottoes,  leaves, insects, animals, large and small      'plenitude and enchainment,  wings, eggshells, clouds and snows' so, to have forgotten, from the inimitable  solar mix, 'unwilling to become a higher key'   on Bach's bedside table, Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria, at the last minute—numbers  and numbers, multitudes as the wind is, fish, I had  forgotten miracles and money  in the mouth of, walked by, in  my lanterned garden where the  nightingale, sometimes jugged to our  joyance, various, pitch and glass of magic grammar and presentiments—the fabled  universe, solvent and fortunes,  the assiduous sweetness among  other stones there we have headed for frying pans,  hospitable, and alone, or the same,  voiceless in the common name,   scattered colours, earlier shapeless,, a candy-wrapper with a phone number  on it suffices to call the largeness, and  the smallness—what of that & on the   clothes-line, stiffened handicraft of meaning, amenable comfort—and  Persian cats, where the rugs flowered       take 'real' life and store it in the cupboards,   the shoe-strings and decorations of natural trees—whisper and  whistle of missing leaves—it's  winter—or summer      or some  other time in the great ritual of plenitude and enchainment the infinite who belongs to this race  of many things, the gentle death, ignorance, and innocence last summer, the youth of it, the  violence with roses and ivy,  sensible words, laughing rose petal or someone     the inner  music has worn out—amidst broad leaves and harbours, linked to the observer,     submerged or proximous, exactly like that  which he loves, startling noise,  clarity and shadow, the heights  of ourselves equal to our shadows,  night and day, the miracle of  many things, the 'proliferation  of geneses' 1 . Where is the point of view? Anywhere  at the source of light. Application,  relation, measurements are made possible by aligning landmarks.Attention. One  can line up the sun and the top of the tomb, or the apex of the  pyramid and the tip of its shadow.  This means that the site may  not be fixed at one location. 2. Where is the object? It too must  be transportable. In fact, it is,  either by the shadow that it casts  or the model that it imitates. 3. Where is the source of light?  It varies, as the gnomen. It transports the object in the  form of a shadow. It is the  object; this is what we will  call the miracle.                                                                          )Serres most beautiful         stars, balls, tinsel, bubbles, red water, the wand

Robert Duncan

Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoirium Wallace Stevens

“That God is colouring Newton doth shew”—William Blake

          Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence.  I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence  as if there could stand some solidity  most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space.  The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne.

          It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end.  For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be  as my own awaits me  immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me.  The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality.  There are too many listeners.  There are too many voices in the one line.  They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him.  The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number  and moves to isolate his heresy.  The number is no longer the same.  He has gone back into the exchange of numbers.  The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen  to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures.

          This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you.  I belong to the company without number.  I shall live one hundred years and then be gone.  Here and now  only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here.  His, the horizon.  His, the perspectives and outlines.  His, the regulation of the relevant.  I will willingly assume his numbers among my own.

          The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.

Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

 

Neither our vices nor our virtues   

further the poem. “They came up   

      and died 

just like they do every year 

      on the rocks.” 

 

      The poem 

feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, 

      to breed    itself, 

a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. 

 

This beauty is an inner persistence 

      toward the source 

striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   

      a call we heard and answer 

in the lateness of the world 

      primordial bellowings 

from which the youngest world might spring, 

 

salmon not in the well where the   

      hazelnut falls 

but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   

      blindly making it. 

 

This is one picture apt for the mind. 

 

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, 

where last year’s extravagant antlers   

      lie on the ground. 

The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   

      new antler-buds, 

      the same, 

 

“a little heavy, a little contrived”, 

 

his only beauty to be   

      all moose.

Robin Blaser

Image-Nation 21 (territory)

 

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

out death or courage, did not

found something, a country,

or end it, but made it endless,

that is his claim to fame, to

seek out what is beyond any single

man or woman, or the multiples

of them    the magic country that

is homeland

 

the bridges    I strained for, strings

of my vastness in language, and

the cars rushed by in both

directions flashing at one another

 

the mechanic of splendour, sought

after, chanted in the windy

cables    and the river sailed,

haphazard, under the solitude

 

he had only the stories to tell, naked

and plotless, the spiritual territories,

earth-images and sky-maps, dark

at the edges

 

the mechanic of the marvellous dreamed

of Stalin and Hitler and the ordinary,

endlessly knew where he had gone

and, then, came back, whatever happens

if, I said — I was talking to religionists —

you gain social justice,

solve the whole terror, then where

is god?    certainly not in happiness

and since god is not in unhappiness,

there you have it     the skilled

adventure in hostilities with no name

Gary Snyder

 

Piute Creek

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted   
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.   
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks   
Warm.   Sky over endless mountains.   
All the junk that goes with being human   
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail   
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge   
Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.   
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

Robert Duncan

 Robert Duncan and Jess Collins

Inspired by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan used layered imagery in collage-like poems. His work relates to that of his life partner, artist Jess (Collins), with whom he frequently collaborated. Jess produced dense collages from found imagery. Jess and Duncan also worked with poet Helen Adam, an integral figure associated with the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry.

Philip Whalen

Further Notice

I can’t live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won’t go away

I shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park 

Gary Snyder

 

Riprap  

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

             in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

             riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

             straying planets,

These poems, people,

             lost ponies with

Dragging saddles—

             and rocky sure-foot trails.

The worlds like an endless

             four-dimensional

Game of Go.

             ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word

             a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

             with torment of fire and weight

Crystal and sediment linked hot

             all change, in thoughts,

As well as things.

Philip Whalen

  

Walking Beside the Kamogawa, Remembering Nansen and Fudo and Gary’s Poem

Here are two half-grown black cats perched on a
lump of old teakettle brick plastic garbage
ten feet from the west bank of the River.
I won’t save them. Right here Gary sat with dying Nansen,
The broken cat, warped and sick every day of its life,
Puke & drool on the tatami for Gary to wipe up & scold,
“If you get any worse I’m going to have you put away!”
The vet injected an overdose of nemby and for half an hour
Nansen was comfortable.

How can we do this, how can we live and die?
How does anybody choose for somebody else.
How dare we appear in this Hell-mouth weeping tears,
Busting our heads in ten fragments making vows &
promises?

Suzuki Roshi said, “If I die, it’s all right. If I should
live, it’s all right. Sun-face Buddha, Moon-face Buddha.”
Why do I always fall for that old line?

Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan, 1948

 

Heavenly City

Robert Duncan's first book, Heavenly City, Earthly City was published by Bern Porter in Berkeley in 1948. The title poem from this volume was chosen by James Laughlin for inclusion in the 1948 volume of New Directions in Prose and Poetry, an annual exhibition gallery of new and divergent trends in literature. The New Directions volume is simply designed, clearly printed and editorially sophisticated, signaled by a dedication to the elegant and tasteful Alfred and Blanche Knopf. “who over the years of there publishing have greatly enriched American culture by providing English translations of significant European Books." Duncan, who is described in the contributors note for him as “young California poet” is in heady company in the volume, which includes essays by Mary McCarthy and Evelyn Waugh (on Hollywood) and fiction by Paul Bowles, Howard Nemerov, Paul Goodman, Carson McCullers, James Agee and Tennesse Williams. It is an intellectual and leftist cast of characters, but a tasteful one and in fact Laughlin provides “A Few random Notes From the Editor” his impressions of the war torn landscapes of Europe, still to him more aesthetically appealing than America. There is a bit of anti-communist rhetoric thrown in too, perhaps to soften the international flavor of the volume, which includes New Poems from Peru (A Little Anthology), A Little Anthology of Italian Poetry (Ungaretti, Montale and others) and a Little Anthology of French Poetry (Char, Michaux, Eluard, Gracq, Prevert). Other poets included in the volume are Richard Eberhart, Vernon Watkins, Pieter Vierck, William Jay Smith and Richard Wilbur. Duncan's long poem takes up 9 pages and has pride of place in the volume with more space than any other poet in the volume. The poem itself is in three sections with an overture, and is a gnostic confabulation of longing, love, bad reactions to love and confusion.

-----Rodney Phillips

Jack Spicer

 

“any Fool Can Get Into An Ocean . . .”

Any fool can get into an ocean  
But it takes a Goddess  
To get out of one. 
What’s true of oceans is true, of course, 
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming  
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed 
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess 
To get back out of them 
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly 
Out in the middle of the poem 
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the 
water hardly moves 
You might get out through all the waves and rocks 
Into the middle of the poem to touch them 
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long 
Enough to want to start backward 
That’s when the fun starts 
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural 
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown 
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth 
But it takes a hero to get out of one 
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course 
Of love and memory. When you start remembering. 

Jack Spicer

Philip Lamantia

  

McClure, Lamantia, Wieners, Meltzer

Michael McClure

 

Michael McClure. Thirteen Mad Sonnets.

Milan

Carl Rakosi

 

excerpt from Ginger

He was poking

                     into the underbush now

and reached across my head

                                        for the small spiny twigs.

At that the phase

                           changed

and a sensuous trembling

                                     hung in the air,

as when a bee is about

                                  to descend

on blossoming clover,

                                 and I

felt myself being pulled

                                     as by a line

from the invisible

                            other side

to enter goathood,

                            deeper than sight.

Philip Whalen

 

FURTHER NOTICE

I can’t live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won’t go away

I shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park.