The kayak passes on

George Hitchcock has passed away. It's hard to explain, in these days of easy experimentalism and general vapidity, how daring and exciting - and above all fun - his magazine kayak was.

Here's how Hitchcock introduced (there were some variations) each issue:

A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed from light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of transport.

KAYAK will appear at least twice a year.

KAYAK will print what its editor considers the best poets now working in the United States and Canada.

KAYAK is particularly hospitable to surrealist, imagist and political poems.

KAYAK welcomes vehement or ribald articles on the subject of modern poetry.

KAYAK does not pay its contributors.

(I suppose that last bit would outrage today's careerists, but one wanted badly to be in kayak.)

Robert Bly once wrote an attack on the magazine's first ten issues - which Hitchcock himself published; but the piece also allowed that kayak offered "nourishment," that it was against "crystalized flower formations from the jolly intellectual dandies... against the high-pitched bat-like cry of the anal-Puritan mandarin... [and against] trapped, small-boned, apologetic, feverish, glassy intellectualist fluttering."



Here's a brief write-up from the kayak collection at the University of Buffalo:

A teacher, publisher, poet, actor, novelist, and playwright as well as an editor, George Hitchcock produced 64 issues of kayak in San Francisco and then Santa Cruz, California. Describing itself as being "particularly hospitable to surrealist, imagist and political poems; prose poems and vehement articles on modern poetry," the magazine featured over its twenty-year span a fairly consistent group of writers including Robert Bly, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, David Ignatow, Hayden Carruth, and Wendell Berry, as well as figures like David Antin, Kathleen Fraser, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, and Anselm Hollo who are usually associated with other literary communities. kayak also published occasional English translations of influential writers such as François Villon, Rafael Alberti, Paul Eluard, and Georg Trakl. Distinguishing the magazine visually are its covers and numerous illustrations featuring eclectic nineteenth-century drawings and engravings as well as contemporary collages. In 1968 kayak was awarded $10,000 by the National Council on the Arts for its contributions "made in advancing the cause of the unknown, obscure or difficult writer, and in the publication of books visually and typographically distinctive."

kayak was visually and typographically distinctive, alrighty - funny, too: a late issue was, according to Hitchcock, "printed on rifle and small-arms target paper rejected as substandard by the U.S. Defense Department."

Nothing conveys the texture of kayak like the original issues, but you can sample some of his own work, and read about kayak, in One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader.

Other obits can be read here and here.

Hitchcock was an original off the page, too, as famously demonstrated when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957. Citing the First Amendment, he declined to answer questions about his politics, though he did say that he was from Hood River, Oregon - "where the delicious apples come from" - and when asked what his profession was, replied:

"My profession is a gardener. I do underground work on plants."

Infinite doppelgängers

Memory is a famous curse. Prediction as with Cassandra is having memorized the future. Funes who forgets nothing is trapped in terrible mental mine. An animal that remembers and created books is always in between an omen & haunting... Proust makes this the central theme of his 7 volumes. A prophet puts all this together in every stroke: why Proust can be read at least 7 times. Like G-d, he wrote the ending first.

-- David Shapiro

*

... there could be a multiplicity of copies of any particular experiment floating about the universe, just as there could be a multiplicity of yous...

-- Rachel Courtland, in the New Scientist

Pictured: Mount Fuji, from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, color woodcut by Katsushika Hokusai

On Tom Pickard's return to the pages of POETRY

In the December issue of Poetry, we'll be publishing Tom Pickard's poignant sequence, "Lark & Merlin," accompanied by a Q&A with him.

In celebration of his return to our pages, I'm linking to a selection from his lovely journals, originally published on this blog in 2008.

Click here!

Pictured: Fells. (See more coming attractions here.)

Source texts & sore subjects

The trend in American poetry books is to have lists of your source texts that are lengthier than the traditional "acknowledgments" page - and sometimes even substantial in their own right.

Just a few recent examples:

Caroline Knox's Nine Worthies
Andrea Brady's Wildfire
Tim Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation
Jean Osman's The Network

(& dare I include Don Share's Squandermania?)

What the devil does it mean?

The practice seems to foreground some aspects of the modernist, or more strictly speaking, "objectivist" legacy, e.g., Charles Reznikoff's Testimony and Holocaust (moreso than, say EP's relentlessly elusive and allusive Cantos). A taxonomy would include Berrigan's Sonnets... and be brought up to date with a consideration of documentary poetics, about which Mark Nowak has written, and works such as M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Rachel Loden's Affidavit, among many others. And it would no doubt culminate in Kenneth Goldsmith's Day (augmented, of course, by Kent Johnson's Day) and Vanessa Place's Tragodía – 1: Statement of Facts; on the former, see Bill Freind's "In the Conceptual Vacuum" and Goldsmith's essay "Uncreativity as Creative Practice;" on the latter, see Steven Fama's recent blogpost.

A pair of recent articles "on the ethics of poetic appropriation" has just gone up on the Poetry Foundation website, one by Abe Louise Young and the other by Raymond McDaniel which respectively represent two opposed views; it's not just a textbook debate when your sources are living breathing people.

I recently blogged about Paideuma, and in the current issue is Aimee L. Pozorski's fascinating look at the way Reznikoff shaped and handled his sources for Holocaust, "Reznikoff's Holocaust Revisited." She makes the point that "given Reznikoff's focus on the power of testimony," Holocaust is a poem that is both "exemplary" as an objectivist poem - and "a document that exceeds the very category." Reznikoff, she writes, "became frustrated with the subjectivity and pathos driving the poetry of his contemporaries," and "called for a move away from the confessional, self-absorbed, symbolist qualities of poetry, and instead sought to detail only the facts [echoes of Steven Fama!], as traditionally instructed in the court of law." What came around is still (make it new?) going around.

Living breathing people, it needn't be pointed out, have deeply lyrical experiences all the time - even when they are under duress and suffering terribly. (My own recent reading provides stark evidence for this: Herman Kruk's The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944 - the most excruciating, heartbreaking book I have ever encountered; even in this literally tortured account of the destruction of an entire world, there are recorded numerous moments of astounding and enduringly-articulated lyrical beauty.) Yet the lyrical-as-such is distrusted, discredited in AmPo; when it rears its lovely head, it gets repurposed - ostensibly for ethical as well as aesthetic reasons.

I don't have an opinion or preference here, I hasten to add; I lovingly and avidly read every "kind" of writing, from goop to experiment, and none has caused me any great harm. As Pozorski poignantly demonstrates, in any case, a poet can be caught "between objectivity and emotion when it comes to matters of life and death." Literary language tells us, she writes, "something useful about what it means to try to articulate 'the truth' or 'the facts' of an event that remains so horrific it often eludes even the most talented wordsmiths." One cringes (tellingly) at "wordsmiths," but she is surely right.

*
In juxtaposition, this, from Brenda Wineapple's essay, "Voice of a Nation," (which is about how "American literature in the 19th century speaks in the 21st in terms we have not yet abandoned for all our sophistication, technology, globalism, and panache.") -

“How slowly our literature grows up!” Hawthorne had groaned in 1845. Could he have read James, who read Hawthorne with such delight and profit, he might have felt that an American literature was, indeed, growing up and perhaps growing wise to boot. Though naysayers accused James of denuding American literature, rendering it bloodlessly detached from the everyday, he actually broadened its definition much as his friend Howells and their friend Crane had tried to do, by making it alive to the possibilities of that mind on whom nothing is lost—not the struggle for survival, not the need for time and money—and which in the end makes literature a place far broader than the borders of nation.

MEANWHILE... This, from Max Saunders' Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografication, and the Forms of Modern Literature:

... from the 1870s to the 1930s autobiography increasingly aspires to the condition of fiction and... this rewrites the literary history of Modernism, to show that, far from negating life-writing, Modernism constantly engages with it dialectically, rejecting it in order to assimilate and transform it.

Modernism's play with masks, personae, unreliable narrators, and its engagement with psychoanalysis too, while they can all be seen as attacks on traditional ways of writing about the lives of people, or understanding character, can themselves be understood as not so much an abandonment of these things, but an attempt to find new ways of doing them.

Pictured: the source of the Po

A revaluation of the New American Poetry

My previous blog post mentioned the terrific new book, Robin Blaser, by Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett, and as promised... here's a look at Fawcett's interesting reassessment of "The New American Poetry." Not since the late Reginald Shepherd wrote on Harriet about its legacy (see here, here, and here) has there been such a detailed - and near-blasphemous! - critique of this enormously influential anthology.

In a section entitled "The New American Poetry and Us," Fawcett writes:

As influences go, the New American Poetry anthology and its principal poets [...] were compelling but not always sanguine. When I stopped publishing verse in 1983 and stopped calling myself a poet and stopped thinking of myself as one, I did so with a sense of having been hustled by The New American Poetry, if not quite betrayed. [...] It was a judgment I came to gradually and reluctantly, and almost without noticing. Yet by the mid-1980s, I'd come to distrust my artistic roots because they and the materials they deployed to construct meaning were unable to defend the particular and local - the very things they proposed to protect - against the new totality of the post-1960 era: the marketplace, corporatism and the cognitive prostheses those forces created to achieve their aims.

Fawcett goes on to conduct a lengthy "autopsy" of the NAP, starting with deep look at its roots in and indebtedness to Olson's "Projective Verse." (I won't comment on that part of Fawcett's essay, but it's fascinating: must reading for anyone who loves or is interested in Olson's work, as well as its influence: it's a great piece of criticism in its own right.) And what he has to say isn't merely a takedown. "Nothing I've argued," he makes clear, "undermines the fact that the New American Poetry in 1960, with its singularity of focus though Olson and its broad range of expressive dissidence, was a uniquely accurate response to the political/cultural tyrannies of the first half of the twentieth century..." He calls the poets of the NAP "a marvelous choir of dissidents singing wildly different songs in different keys," and says that anyone who reads their work alongside the "straight" work of the period "will discover how many good poets were part of it, and how much better their poetry" is. And he outlines at some length - in thirteen sections - what the influence of the NAP and Olson did accomplish, and why it remains compelling.

But his reservations are interesting. It is, he says, very hard

... not to assign a measure of opprobrium to the New American Poetry for the things it missed and for the contemptuous attitudes toward readers it more or less openly encouraged. By itself, that contempt has to bear some responsibility for the intellectual and cultural catastrophe that has reduced literature to the status of cultural craft activity - not that every other genre and movement can't be tarred with the same brush.

He claims that their revolution, when it materialized, was misunderstood by those poets who were on the leading edge of the NAP:

The deep thinkers of the New American Poetry thought that the enterprise of postmodernism was about the extension of private consciousness and thus an occasion for writing about poetry. In the real world, postmodernism has been about the superimposition of economic and fiscal models upon all human activities and the substitution of commodity consumption for meaning and for human solidarity. In this error, the bright lights of the New American Poetry were monumentally self-serving, and their errors seeded my generation with a self-absorption and arrogance that runs so deep only a tiny minority of us to this day recognizes the humiliation of what has transpired in the shift over the last thirty years from political and cultural models based on democracy and equality of opportunity to an oligarchy of Darwinian entrepreneurs modeling all human activities on the marketplace.

The NAP and Projective Verse (the latter grounded in the idea that collective understandings are the basis of democratic politics), Fawcett says, "have become cages and shackles not much better or worse than the cage and shackles they set out to free poets from." Strong words! But there's more. He connects the NAP to the "ostentatious failure" of totalitarian ideologies and their entrepreneurs; and accuses the successors of the NAP of being silent on, or "stupidly partisan" about the imposition of the marketplace "as the sole arbiter of culture and politics." Strikingly, he says that "a less recognized mistake of the New American Poetry is that it didn't recognize that the technical genius of one generation is automatically built into the next generation's operating system." Emphasis, as they say, mine.

Of his NAP mentors, Fawcett says that "their technical fist-pounding was no substitute for competent global politics, or for having a working sense of how and why different eras constructed verse, or learning to practice an open-minded phenomenology in the heart of a projective poem, something that was dead easy for Olson... [...] In the end, the New American Poetry foundered on its ill-conceived prejudice for spontaneity, which is what, when attentions lag, you get when you jettison the Aristotelian toolbox."

All this strikes me as quite a bombshell, embedded as it is, in the context of Robin Blaser's own life and work, which stand out from that of his NAP colleagues and friends Duncan and Spicer, et al. As Fawcett points out, the great thing about Blaser was that his pedagogy was open.

Now look, don't flame me for writing up what Fawcett has to say: I haven't made up my mind about all of this, and I'm not endorsing it, just reporting it. Nor have I done justice to what Fawcett says for, let alone against, the NAP - if I kept quoting all the things I'd like to, I'd be a copyright violator! I certainly cut quite a few teeth, like so many others, on the NAP anthology, and love much of it to this day. There is no more worn book on my bookshelves. Yet it's healthy and right to critique what we love... and the world is very different now than it was in 1960. Fawcett is right, whatever one thinks, to raise the question of how much substance and structure must underpin writing. And he's certainly right to question - as a Canadian - "the political and cultural physics" of the New American Poetry's "dissident American epic concerns" and its impositions on poets around the globe.

Losing Robin Blaser occasioned Fawcett's revaluation of the NAP. I'm sure Blaser would have endorsed this kind of serious soul-searching.

Addendum: Read comments for a response by Brian Fawcett

Pictured: New American painting; the term "revaluation" was put on the litcrit map by F.R. Leavis

Major Minor

Garrett Caples has just published - it's the very first "Wave Pamphlet" - a screed entitled Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English. It kicks off with Auden's admission that he couldn't enjoy one poem by Shelley yet was delighted by every line of William Barnes, even though he knew perfectly well that Shelley "is a major poet and Barnes a minor one." Caples takes this and runs with it, perhaps not allowing for Auden's propensity to say such things in passing, and for effect - Auden's pronouncements always have to be taken with a grain or more of salt. Caples, in any case, also prefers Barnes to Shelley (I bet a lot of folks do, actually; I prefer Clough and Beddoes to both, myself). And in this essay he intends to construct an argument about minor as opposed to major poets, which is a lot more than Auden was up to. And so Caples expresses a "disinclination to return to Dryden," prefers William Diaper to him, and says he's more likely to return to Nicholas Breton, Gentleman than to Shakespeare. Cables admits that preferences like these may be arbitrary; but counterbalancing every "major" poet with a "minor" one stretches the point rather dramatically. And what is that point? Caples says:

... I've built up quite a stable of minor poets, and I've often wondered why. It stems partly from a lifelong habit of pursuing the obscure rather than the readily at hand. This is not to say there aren't plenty of major poets I've read with profit - I even enjoyed chugging through Wordsworth's Prelude, in college - but rather that I grow bored with the available. As a poet, I feel the need to see what else has been done, besides what everyone already knows. For a poet, I think, finds much food for contemplation in the minor, imperfect, sometimes even the bad poet; you find things that have been attempted that have failed or turned out ridiculous, but that yet seem like intriguing possibilities for further exploration, that might yield great poetry if handled differently or even simply more competently... To write major poetry, the poet perhaps must resist the major, to find fault with what, at a given time, is held to be major poetry and propose another way, in order to not simply repeat the past, in order to "make it new."

The dichotomy may simply be false. Major poets do not, as Caples's own account of reading demonstrates, displace the minor; there's room enough for both on the reading list. It's true that "minor" poets - not the same thing, by the way, as non-canonical poets - aren't much taught in school, but as I imagine Caples would agree, school's not necessarily the best place to learn about poetry. (Digression and example: once upon a time, I did some adjunct teaching at a "major" university on the East Coast, where I shared an office with a bona fide Ph.D. student in the English Department. One fall afternoon, that grad student overheard me talking with a student about a poem I love, Fulke Greville's "Myra," -- "Mad girls may safely love as they may leave; / No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive" -- and scolded me later on: "You DO know that Fulke Greville is a minor poet, don't you?" I didn't know, and I didn't care.) At any rate, here's an important corollary point: there are "minor" works by "major" poets. So what might Caples think of Dryden's less-read, seldom-taught, and very odd verse plays? Or, say, the stranger long poems by Frank O'Hara that nobody teaches, discusses, anthologizes, or imitates? And who would argue that major poets aren't just as "imperfect" as minor ones - surely their imperfections are of interest. Looking for the overlooked - which all poets ought to do, just as Cables suggests - doesn't require dispensing babies with bathwater.

The problem is with the terms like "major" and "minor." If we reject them, gone will be our anxiety, and no upper or lower limits will narrow our curiosity. Simple, eh? Aren't we always free to read whatever the heck we please? That aside, I don't see why it's so bad to have to chug through, as Caples himself profitably did, the "majors." Another thing: why is boredom so terrible? I'll refrain from trotting out Berryman on the subject - but poets sure are bored these days! Why are people who are easily bored drawn to poetry, of all things? It's hard to think of another activity in which boredom counts for much: Athletics? The practice of medicine (would you want a surgeon who was bored in med school, or who is bored by major diseases?)? Piloting airplanes? Or is learning about poetry qualitatively a different endeavor? I won't press the point.

Alright, I've bloviated; but doing so is not a put-down of Caples or this pamphlet. I adore his prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging - despite the weighty title, the essay feels like some chunk of a great conversation you'd have over a couple of beers. And we need more poets weighing in on things the way he has here - and more publishers like Wave willing to publish extended one-off essays like this one. Kudos to both! And you'll notice I haven't even said anything about the other focus of the essay: the Symbolists. The influence of Symbolism in American literature is something hardly anybody else has paid attention to, and his account of searching it out is useful, as well as great fun.

For me, though, where Caples really gets going is at the very end of the booklet, with a terrific rant about "major poet" [though his status as such has been much and hotly disputed already] Hart Crane's plagiarizing the work of "minor poet" Samuel Greenberg, which Caples argues has interfered with the reception of the latter's work. Crane

... plagiarized the then-unknown and virtually unpublished "minor poet" [Greenberg, who died in 1917 at the age of 23], drawing on a typescript made from manuscripts in the possession of their mutual friend, William Murrell Fisher. As Marc Simon's [Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts] demonstrates, lines of Greenberg appear intermittently in poems Crane composed between 1924 and 1929; one of Crane's most famous poems, "Emblems of Conduct," is in fact entirely composed of Greenberg's lines, from the poem "Conduct" and others... This circumstance, first discovered in 1936, only four years after Crane's death, continues to embarass his admirers, who have attempted to rationalize the theft as "borrowing," "influence," "rewriting," or, in Simon's idiotic phrase, "the Greenberg pattern." Crane, we are told - even by [James] Laughlin [posthumous publisher of Greenberg's work!], who censures him to some extent - has made these lines "his own" by revision and incorporation into his poems. No one will call Crane a plagiarist, which he was; there's no other word for it. I will grant that Crane was mentally ill. And quite probably, had not Crane stolen from it, Greenberg's work would have disappeared into obscurity. Yet this hardly excuses Crane's actions. For this is not a case of literary allusion or postmodern citation - the way that, say, Ashbery's line "fleeing from us that sometimes did us seek," is a slightly altered quotation of Sir Thomas Wyatt - or of seeing the potential in a minor poet's unsuccessful projects.

Caples, when asked whether he thinks Greenberg is a better poet than Crane, says: "I suppose I do." (He finds Crane's work "boring and misguided" [boredom again!], even "conservative and academic.") Defending this preference, he notes that when Crane "lifts a line from Greenberg, it becomes inert, wooden. Torn from his context, it dies." And this strikes me as a very useful and interesting way - unlike the major/minor strategy - to look at what poets do with, or to, the work of others. (I urge anybody interested in this matter to read Christopher Ricks's fascinating Allusion to the Poets - especially the chapter on plagiarism.)

OK, the joke's on me! Caples abandons - on the very last page!! - the terms "major" and "minor," after all, and concludes: "There will always be greater, more significant, more influential poets than others, true. But given the extreme difficulty of achieving anything as a poet, why segregate poets according to the crude dualism of major and minor? If we must make a distinction, I would rather say there are poets, and there are non-poets. This is a far truer conception of the state of human affairs." Here he leaves us - with what would constitute a fine beginning to another essay, another controversy. I'm looking forward to more Wave pamphlets - and to more of Caples's thoughts about what he's reading. I wish he had a blog. Does he??

***

On the subject of what we're reading, I've also just plowed my way though Robin Blaser (New Star, 2010), an eponymous tribute which consists of an essay each by Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett. It's a poignant, rich, and lovely look at Blaser's work by two poets who knew him well. The book as a physical object is beautiful, and it includes a number of pictures of Blaser you won't have seen elsewhere. Above all, it's a fine introduction - especially Persky's illuminating essay - to Blaser's poetry. As a book about poetry, it's exemplary.

Here's something, by the way, Fawcett says which is pertinent to my complaint about boredom above: "Blaser brought with him, to everything he did, the exhilaration of intelligence - the promise that one can know one's world, and the conviction that the effort to understand without simplification is always worth the difficulty."

Fawcett digresses, by the way, (rather like Caples, as above) into a very interesting critique of the "New American Poetry," about which more shortly.
Pictured: The major and the minor

Fallacies, intentional and otherwise

I recently blogged about Michael Wood's new book, Yeats & Violence, and thought I'd post a little more about it. Having done so earlier elicited, to my surprise, some snark; I dunno, is Wood not cool enough or something? Maybe only Helen Vendler should write about Yeats? Sheesh.

Anyway, Wood devotes a few pages to a digression on the question (if that's the right word) of authorial intention. More snark will come, I fear - yet I feel that this is a good bone to gnaw on during the dog days, so here goes!

Wood finds that there's much to be said for the "now often ignored case" against the intentional fallacy, "and for the related metaphor of the author's death," that is, for the "implication that authors are in an interesting and important sense absent from their texts" - that they "become their admirers, as Auden said of Yeats, or at least become their readers. A text is defenceless, it just repeats itself, Socrates claimed in the Phaedrus..." Wimsatt and Beardsley, he says, were "too extreme in their suggestion that knowledge of an author's intention is 'neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.' Often unavailable, often interesting, quite often misleading, and always insufficient as a critical measure, would be closer."

(As Borges made clear in "The Aleph," a terrible poem could be a masterpiece if we only referred to the poet's ambitions for it; and, Wood adds, Lionel Trilling memorably proposed that if Shakespeare did not intend anything less than Hamlet, it's also true that he didn't write anything less than Hamlet, whatever his intentions were!)

Still, Wood argues:

... there is something wasteful and disagreeable about not wanting to know what writers think they are doing, and about the accompanying assumption that critics know better. It doesn't seem implausible that writers often achieve what they intend and that their intention has something to do with their achievement. If I find enormous subtleties in a literary work, chances are the writer put them there. The subtle mind at play is the writer's rather than mine. I'm doing what I can but I'm just following clues, not placing them.

A difficulty remains, and significant differences hide within similar critical phrases. A reader's idea of an author's intention is always a guess, if often a good one. This is true even when authors tell us what their intentions are. We don't have to suspect them of lying but neither can we assume they are immune to the ordinary frailties of human self-knowledge. To say nothing of the times when they wish to speak ambiguously, or make a joke.

(That last part really speaks to me: when assembling commentary on a certain poet's work that was partly based on his own correspondence, it looked for a while that I'd not get permission to quote him on the grounds that - as his family put it - he was a "pathological liar.")

Wood continues:

When reading a poem we are guessing if we see ourselves as trying to imagine what went on in the poet's mind as he wrote. But if we are just tracking whatever intentionality we find in the words and sentences as we see or hear them, we are not guessing, we are reading, we are exercising our ordinary abilities of comprehension, and the court of appeal is the language itself or more precisely our knowledge of the language and the possibility of trying out our understandings on others who know the language well and care about it.

We can go quite a long way in language without invoking intention at all. Vocabulary and grammar alone will allow me to understand a line [of poetry]... I begin to need intention - to need to imagine an intention - when I try to hear the overtones, and hear if there are any overtones... It's at points like this that readers' choices begin. Different readers choose differently but these are real options, substantive and discussable modes of interpretive action, more like theories or legal opinions than like guesses, and we don't have to imagine the mind of a particular person to get to them. We only have to imagine, as we can scarcely avoid imagining in the presence of any speech act, a tone and a direction...

And in the end, even though the author is dead, so to speak, he/she's the one who put the words together, and so "deserves all the credit for whatever wonder and danger we find" in a poem; "but the words are not his any more than they are ours, and to be a poet is, among other things, to take one's chances with language."

To paraphrase W., we are guessing, and poets keep us guessing.

Speaking of guessing and dead poets, Wood tells a great story about how he and a friend once had a bet about the meaning of a remark Philip Larkin made in an interview. "In response to a casual mention of Borges... Larkin had said, 'Who is Borges?' My friend... took Larkin at his word, thought he was asking a question about a figure whose name he really didn't know. I thought Larkin was pretending ignorance and taking the opportunity to wind the interviewer up a little." As Wood points out, either reading seems plausible - though both can not have been intended. So... Wood's friend, the late Gamini Salgado, finally wrote to Larkin to consult the oracle directly ("to borrow the image Wimsatt and Beardsley use for worrying about intention"). A reply was received - but you'll have to read the book to find out what it was!

***

In my recent blog post about the new issue of Paideuma, I mentioned in passing that I have a quibble with Andrea Brady's wonderful essay about researching John Wieners's archives. I'll tell you now what it was. As most readers of Wieners know, he came to hold some racist and anti-Semitic views; the latter, Brady observes, he shared with his friends Jack Spicer and Steve Jonas. Brady does a thorough and thoroughly frank job exploring those views. She concludes that the paranoia underlying Wieners's anti-Semitism can be seen as "part of the disintegration of trust in his relationships with friends and family, as a symptom of mental illness; but it also suggests that the theatrical roles which people some of his later poetry might express of [sic] anxiety towards systems he believed to control his fate."

Understood. She adds: "It should be remembered however that Wieners lived in conditions which could easily elicit paranoia." She quotes Michael Rumaker, who remembers the "heavy climate of fear" in San Francisco of the late 1950s and 1960s, particularly among gay men. It's clear that "though more socially liberated than the rest of the country, San Francisco still policed the gay and drug subcultures that Wieners celebrated." As Rumaker put it, "the Morals Squad was everywhere," and entrapment was a real risk; "you never knew who you were talking to. Among the hip avant-garde, everyone was on his guard." Brady comments that "though Wieners's fearfulness could take eccentric turns, it was not just a sign of an oncoming crisis of schizophrenia but a response to his social reality."

She's saying, in other words, that as Delmore Schwartz famously put it, even paranoids have real enemies. No doubt! But just what part of his "social reality" induced the anti-Semitism? We aren't told. Either Brady has elided something here, or something sinister has gone unexplained. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the argument.

Otherwise, her piece is really terrific: must reading for anyone interested in Wieners's work, and even if you're not, it's exemplary with regard to the use of archival material in the appreciation and criticism of poetry.

As it happens, I recently received Brady's handsome book, Wildfire: a Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination. It's from Krupskaya - who have also published Ryan Murphy's The Redcoats; Murphy wonderfully published Jack Spicer's Hokku Notebook. I hope to blog about these books soon.

Pictured: The death of the author.