Robert Duncan

Kenneth Rexroth once referred to Robert Duncan as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the post-war American poets, yet he himself insisted that he is a derivative poet who borrowed from sources as diverse as Dante, Pound, Blake, H.D., Stein, Yeats, Garcia, Lorca and St. John of the Cross. His way of mixing different influences in his densely woven, multi-layered poems was also described by Stephen Stepanchev in American Poetry since 1945, who saw Duncan’s poems as “a compositional field where anything might enter: a prose quotation, a catalogue, a recipe, a dramatic monologue, a diatribe.”

Duncan was born in 1919 in Oakland, California and studied at the University of California-Berkeley. Due to his friendship with Charles Olson and his stay at Black Mountain College he is often associated with Black Mountain poetics. He was however also a key figure in the emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

Duncan published more than twenty collections of poetry. His honours include the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, and three writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1985 he also received the National Poetry Award.

Duncan died in San Francisco in 1988.

Links:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/duncan/duncan.htm
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-duncan
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-duncan
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php

My poem below is a response to Duncan’s “Poetry, a Natural Thing”.

~ - ~

Poetry, a language thing

neither rigid definition nor ideological certainty
further the poem. “pronoun verb preposition
conjunction verb
conjunction preposition pronoun verb determiner noun
preposition determiner noun.”

The poem
emerges somewhere between the written
and the         read
popularly drawn toward mystical half-meanings and evasive metaphor.

The appearance of coherence based upon
the cultural expectations
of a (formal) pattern of white space
around a string of symbols which
in the lateness of the world
encourage deciphering
as formal and material aspects are suffused.

A visual or sonic pattern or rhythm
a play
or puzzle reference intended for the
well-informed poetic archaeologist.

This is one line open to textual interpretation.

A second: introduction of the disruptive techniques
of postmodernism de-constructivism third-wave feminism
or pop and collocation,
creating an ever-expanding field of
reference on
the page,

“literary signifiers of otherness and intrusion”,

borrowing from those who wrote
this first.

George Evans

George Evans’ biography is somewhat different than that of many other poets. Born in 1948 in Pittsburgh, he did not even finish high school and instead joined the US Air Force at the age of eighteen. He served in Vietnam but soon got into trouble for staging anti-war protests. During his service he also received his high school diploma through a GED test. Since the end of the war Evans has then been an outspoken anti-war activist and advocate for the homeless.

Since 1985, Evans has published five collections of poetry both in the US and Great Britain. His honors include writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the California Arts Council, and a Japanese government Monbusho Fellowship for the study of Japanese literature. He lives in San Francisco.

Links:
http://jacket2.org/content/george-evans
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/author/george-evans

When I tried to write my own response the Evans’ work, I was struck by the important role his experience of the war seems to have (at least in the poems Hoover included in the anthology). I, of course, have no such experience and any attempt to speak about war therefore seemed futile. Instead I decided to write about the impact the faraway war in Syria has on my life in this peaceful part of the world, i.e. Europe.

~ - ~

red & blue

he was there
when we finally
opened our eyes
to a cold
dawn on a
thursday in early
September as the
tide proceeded to
rub off the
sand salt water
streaming in dark
patches across europe
red & blue

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended Harvard University from 1944, but abandoned his studies only a year later to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India. Upon his return to the US in 1946, he started publishing his poetry and began corresponding with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. It was also through correspondence that he became friends with Charles Olson who invited Creeley to teach at Black Mountain College from 1954.

As Michael Hrebeniak put it in his obituary to Creeley for the Guardian:

“[Creeley’s] pared-down poems activate the nervous, interior measures of a restless underground man, with halting line-breaks determined by breath and bop jump-cuts. The speaker's stance is amoral and passive, more so when women are the subject (in life, the reverse was true). Phrases are terse and elliptical, devoid of argument, conceptualisation or characterisation; each work is a minutely detailed pressure point set into motion.”

In a review, Forrest Gander wrote of Creeley’s work:

“Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind’s concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed ... Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word.”

Creeley published more than sixty books of poetry. His honours include the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He also served as New York state poet laureate from 1989 to 1991 and as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Creeley died in 2005 at the age of 78.

Links:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/creeley/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-creeley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1452159,00.html – The Guardian Obituary


Trying to write a response to Creeley I found myself struggling with his inward-facing, philosophical lyricism which feels miles away from my own social and political understanding of poetry. My response therefore took Creeley’s “Locate I love you” from his poem “The Language” and redirected its poetic inquiry into a completely different direction.

~ - ~

definition

locate the political
somewhere
in

between
your thighs
your ears, your armpits

at your finger-
tips leaking from
the pen

radiating
from the flat screen
in the corner

of your mouth
when you smile and
I smile back at

you.

Hilda Morley

Hilda Morley is often referred to as a “painter’s poet”. Born in 1916 in New York City, she spent several years of her childhood and early adulthood in Israel and England, before returning to the US during the war. It was upon her return to New York that she met her second husband, the painter Eugene Morley and was introduced to many painters and poets of the New York scene.

While her work is generally filed under the “Black Mountain” label due to her brief teaching period at Black Mountain College in 1952, it has also been significantly influenced by Abstract Expressionism. As Harper's contributor and poet Hayden Carruth wrote of Morley’s work:

"How simple the language is, not a rhetorical gesture, not an unnecessary adjective, yet heightened by interweaving lines, cadences, and tones, by urgency of feeling and fineness of perception. We have these expressive works, indispensable to what we call American literature.”

Morley gained wider recognition as a poet only fairly late in her life. Her first major collection What Are Winds & What Are Water was only published in 1983. It is a book-length threnody for avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe, Morley’s third husband, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1972. Her other collections include A Blessing Outside Us (1976), To Hold in my Hand (1983), Cloudless at First (1988) and Between the Rocks (1992), in addition to the posthumously published The Turning (1998). Morley died in London on 23 March 1998.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/hilda-morley
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/morley.html (Robert Creeley: For Hilda Morley)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Morley
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/27/arts/hilda-morley-81-wrote-poetry-shaped-by-abstract-expressionism.html (obituary)



My poem below is a response to Morley’s “For Elaine de Kooning”. It took its starting point with the Tate Gallery’s #workoftheweek post of “Seafood” (2001) by Howard Hodgkin on Instagram.

~ - ~

@ Howard Hodgkin

lived in a square
lived in a box
treasure
as natural
wide as the sea
the see #workoftheweek
as deep texture
and pigment motions
the taste of memory
the crispy salt along
the beach
my feet and surf always
dancing
wet tangled hair
the breeze and you
the journey on wet sand
heavy
and light expanding
in a box
in a square
the see in
#workoftheweek

Ed Dorn

"I think I'm rightly associated with the Black Mountain 'school,' not because of the way I write, but because I was there." Ed Dorn was part of the diverse group of artists and writers who were lucky enough to study at the legendary Black Mountain College during its fairly brief existence between 1933 and 1957. He attended the college between 1955/6, studying with Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley. It is often claimed that Olsen’s ideas of Projective Verse had a great influence on Dorn, but as Marjorie Perloff put it in 1974: “Dorn is really quite unlike Olson; he is, for that matter, quite unlike any poet writing today.” Of his most acclaimed poem, Slinger (1968), she writes: it is

“one of the most ambitious and interesting long poems of our time, a truly original cowboy-and-indian saga, rendered in the most ingenious mix of scientific jargon, Structuralist terminology, junkie slang, Elizabethan sonneteering, Western dialect, and tough talk."

As the Poetry Foundation points out:

“Dorn's writing is almost always socially and politically oriented. From his earlier studies of Shoshoni Indians and the transients near Puget Sound to his reflections on the state of America in Slinger, Dorn's concern for his neighbors is evident in his work.”

This aspect, in addition to his ingenious usage of irony and satire, really makes him one of the most delightful reads in the anthology. I highly recommend taking a look at the poems which are available online at the Poetry Foundation and listening to the readings at PennSound.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-dorn
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/dorn/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php


My below poem is a piece developed out of some thoughts when I read Dorn's poem "Geranium".


~ - ~

Geranium, Don’t

As a Flower I can never quite remember
silly silly silly me
I used to be a Rosebud surely
made happy
made merry marry and successful tears
or not through woods Buttercups and bitter wisdom.
My money raised though
I used to be a Poppy in a field
when you picked me and you picked me
it wilted quickly read and red and blue.
We Daisy perfect for your business
your voice and connectivity
I the mobile manageable capitulum.
Narcissus, you said, were well known
in ancient point giving head, no teeth.
You used to call me Daffodil sweetly.
But then I never was.
I never was a Thistle:
inspiration sweeping sea
views 36 hectares of tropical
nine hole in the sad sand dream.
Surely surely sometimes Dandelion,
both edible in their entirety.
I was the centre of the no no,
a Tulip in the Pamir Hindu Kush,
Tien Shan along the rocky road.
“ In modern horticulture they tend to use the term
‘ Pansy ’ for those large-flowered multi-coloured hybrids
that are grown for bedding purposes each year. “
“ Sign up to the newsletter and get in the know, Daliah. ”
“ You can have hyacinths flowering for Christmas
if you plant specially ‘prepared’ bulbs. “
I wanted to be that Honeysuckle.
My hardiness mostly fully
 some tender species but always easy always for you.
Magical ingredients for deliciously simple quickly.
We grew moist summers - I, an Aster -
especially cool nightly temperature.
Or maybe I was Hortensia:
a Roman woman who successfully
repealed a tax imposed by the Second Triumvirate in 42 BC.
A sweetly scented highly poisonous woodland flower,
Lily of the Valley, I used to be a song so sweet.
So sweet, you cried and died and I grew in you,
laying down my roots more firmly
in the decomposing weeds.
But I never never wanted to be the Geranium.
Never that one one.
The Geranium.
Please, please don’t make me be.

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923 and moved to the US with her American husband in 1947. Even though her early poetry in England still went under the label of the “New Romantics” she soon abandoned this formal writing style for a more experimental practice after moving to the US. Under the influence of the Black Mountain poets – in particular Robert Creeley, who was a friend of her husband – she soon established herself as one of the most successful and celebrated poets in the US. Until her death in 1997, she had published more than twenty volumes of poetry and worked extensively as a university teacher.

Levertov followed William Carlos Williams in the idea of a more “organic” poetic form. As Hoover quotes her in the anthology: “For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal.”

All a poet would therefore have to do is pay sufficient attention to the world around her in order to see its inherent form. The ultimate goal for Levertov was a kind of authenticity in poetry – a concept, I have to admit, I struggle with. Maybe it is indeed my “insufficient” attention to the world which keeps me from understanding the inherent form of things. Yet as a 21st century poet living in a world of infinite pluralism, this kind of religious belief in one particular kind of “true” poetic form somehow troubles me. This vast gap between her poetics and what I understand to be a more “contemporary” kind of poetics is also revealed by her tendencies toward (as Hoover puts it) “themes of visionary Christianity” and a general tendency toward “beauty and wholeness”. It certainly sets her apart from the Language poets.

My own response to Levertov below is therefore only very loosely related to her poem “Overland to the Islands” and (at least in terms of style) bears a closer resemblance to the prose poetry of writers such as Russell Edson.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/denise-levertov
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/levertov/levertov.htm
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/denise-levertov




~ - ~

The Lost Islander

On a walk with my dog

on a walk with loyalty

in the grassy fields

in the high chilling wind

down a steep hill

I stumbled

and I fell into the ocean

where the tide pulled me

and the waves carried me

away

down among the oysters

and the turtles

I grew purple seaweed

for ashen hair

my skin turned

a silver armour

I danced like the dawn

among the coral reef

in distant oceans

I travelled with

the cry of the sea gull

I am an excellent swimmer

so long I have forgotten

how to walk

Larry Eigner

Charles Bukowski once called Larry Eigner the "greatest living poet" – and definitely Bukowski was not alone with his admiration. His unique poetry has had a strong influence particularly on the Language poets and he is praised by fellow poets like Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Robert Grenier up to this very day.

Larry Eigner suffered from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair since early childhood. It is this fact, which as Samuel Charters put it in the biographical notes to his collection The World and its Streets, Place, “has given a form and shape to his poetry” as he was forced to observe much of the world merely through the windows of his house. His disability also meant that the physical act of writing took tremendous effort from Eigner. The combination of these two facts might explain the meditative, elegant density of his poems which combine an appreciation for the small things with a particular attention to the use of the page space. His work is therefore often seen an outstanding realisation of Charles Olson’s idea of “Projective Verse”. As Robert Grenier writes in his introduction to the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner:

“Following out from experiments in the work of Cummings, Pound and Williams, […], Larry Eigner’s mature writing is perhaps the best (and most varied) fulfilment we have, to date, of tendencies and possibilities regarding the use of space in poetry gathered into and ‘projected’ out into the future of American poetry by Olson’s theory of composition by field.”

Larry Eigner died from pneumonia and other complications in 1996.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/larry-eigner
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/eigner/
http://jacketmagazine.com/25/hibb-eign.html
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Eigner.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Eigner

My own response below uses the looking-glass of the internet as a source. If the view outside the window was the primary source of inspiration for Eigner, I felt a 21st century response would reflect the fact that our view upon the world is now largely shaped by the information we gather through digital media. For many people living today the glance on the computer screen is now more habitual and a more important source of information than the view out of their window. I therefore decided to draw the following picture of my city mainly from the material found on news websites.

~ - ~

how it comes about sometimes:

{change}

next door to the Braehead shopping centre

   alterations to the existing

                     as the former Clydebuilt Scottish Maritime Museum

which shut down five years ago

[ as shortage in funding ]

                                    has been earmarked as the     potential

     where the food

banks

and high

                -rises of Drumchapel

  just two miles from the sandstone villas

                                                                        [ school catchment concerns ]

   a former bridal shop      is in the neighbourhood children

                make their way from school

                house to Easterhouse

cheap [ nutritious ]           soup in the cafe at the Baptist Church

a syringe in the gutter

                                 [ modern life on the broo ]

  with a pain[ t ] ed expression outside

a dilapidated

            block of flats in an incongruous city

suit and dress shoes

  wasteland left

behind

remains

                                                   like a monument

                                                  “There is a matching block behind

                                                 still

 inhabited

              washing flapping on balconies

              the wind

  cutting

 mattresses and

                       junk still

       the grass

             {change}

              gathering

in George Street

               sitting

in the garden of her council house in Possilpark

              listened patiently the Victorian gravestones in the Necropolis that looms above Glasgow

by rich

merchants in the heyday

                                              [  the incident in Hutton Drive ]

riverside land has derelict for nearly 40 years   properties

                                                                         a mix of social

                                            rented

                                            shared

     equity and family

[ homes ?

                  Dalmarnock Power Station chimney

                                                                            high

rise flats in Sighthill Balornock [Red Road Flats] Gallowgate Dalmarnock the Oatlands 55 & 75 Plean St

                   a skyline for decades

dust

Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn was a New York Poet – but then again, he wasn’t. He spent most of his life in New York City, yet as Robert Creeley points out his Preface to Against the Silences, he was still strongly shaped by the experience of his Puritan New England childhood. He was an important figure in the New York poetry scene of the 1950s and 60s, organising readings and helping out fellow poets, yet one of his most important influences were the Provencial poets he started studying in his 20s and which he translated throughout his life. As a close friend to Robert Creeley he has often been associated to the Black Mountain Poets, but he himself resisted such categorisation. His own poetics – probably summarised best in his 1954 statement (http://jacketmagazine.com/12/blac-stat.html) – lays a great emphasis on the sound quality of poetry. Reading it today – more than 60 years later – I found some of his words almost prophetic, or maybe we have just been heading in the same bloody direction for 60 years!

I recommend checking out the recordings of his readings on Penn Sound and a whole bunch of poems on EPC.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Blackburn.php

~ - ~

Hackney Pandora

After Paul Blackburn

it’s not so much about

curiosity

as about               finding  someone

to blame for all

the         dog shit

& take-away                      chicken

bones & blue

off-license plastic bags

garnishing the   trendy                  side-

walks     of artisan sourdough dreams

sweeping            it                            all           up

every morning at six thirty-five before

we          catch

the over               - ground to highbury     or kingsland

as if        land                      -fill the fucking void

or congestion

charge

just like the cats

and sacks

and that               weirdo schroedinger

(or so they say )              when

singed fur smell &            skunk                   fills the

air

& you can’t escape                           it

                forty hours are never                     enough

in the shade of

 shards &

 restaurant                          bookies

plain                      payday mockery 

most of us           (  living)                               in            a              box

  anyway

with the mouldy bits

&             three     weeks                   of rent                                 behind

so all      they                       are concerned   about

is to                                                        screw

the lid back on

screw

the lid back on

so that

fucking laughing cynic

 hope                    remains

Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin, born in Boston in 1935 actually spend most of his life in France. He made the acquaintance of the French poet Rene Char in 1962 and soon after decided to move to the country himself. Apart from his poetry he also published novels, essays and worked as a translator.

As Paul Hoover points out Sobin held to “an organic theory of composition”, which was often focused on the sonic aspects of language. His poetry is marked by heavy use enjambment as well as assonance and consonance. Although he did not belong to a particular school of poetry he was heavily influenced by Robert Duncan and George Oppen.

Hoover includes includes 3 of Sobin’s poems in his anthology: “Out of the Identical”, “What the Music Wants” and “Eleven Rock Poems”.

I found his poems a little bit harder to come by online. Here are just two sources I found:

http://www.webdelsol.com/Facture/poems/gustafsobin.htm

http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c35-gs.htm

         

~ - ~

                                                           

Out of the dissimilar

After Gustaf Sobin

A hand’s

writing the

sheet is

wavy

with

its perspiration

wrung

out of tight

knots fingers

dug deep into

soft folds

of fabric

held

fast kinetic

loops

pressure marks

(ink bleeding)

stains as

caesura

hovering

over

interpretation