More CPR for Silliman and Lowell

I don't have time to write today... probably good news for you! But I've hired a stand-in -- one of my staff writers, Robert Lowell, who has recently responded quite positively to literary CPR, has agreed to submit some of his early comments on William Carlos Williams and the Beats to FSC.

Lowell's collected prose is quite short, about 370 pages, and not ambitious at all as a "critical" collection. In fact, they are not unlike blog entries themselves -- informal appreciations of what he felt informed him (though far from "lugubrious"). The parts that I most enjoy are those which depict him changing his mind, and which illustrate for me the humility one poet had before the language, which he recognized as coming from elsewhere, in a sense -- transmissions from the culture in which he lived but felt that, at times, he didn't know. I don't think it was ever in fashion to be entirely candid about one's failures, especially after having won the Pulitzer with a first book.

Lowell's first two short essays on WCW were written in 1947, around the time he published Lord Weary's Castle (the title of which, Ron Silliman claims, told us "all about his literary allegiances"). But his longer, more considered "career assessment"-type essay was written in '62, from which the following quotes are taken:

To explain the full punishment I felt on first reading Williams, I should say a little about what I was studying at the time. A year or so before, I had read some introductory books on the enjoyment of poetry, and was knocked over by the examples in the free-verse sections. When I arrived at college, independent, fearful of advice, and with all the world before me, I began to rummage through the Cambridge bookshops. I found books that must have been looking for a buyer since the student days of Trumbull Stickney: soiled metrical treatises written by obscure English professors in the eighteen-nineties. They were full of glorious things: rising rhythm, falling rhythm, feet with Greek names, stanzas from Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” John Drinkwater, and Swinburne. Nothing seemed simpler than meter. I began experiments with an exotic foot, short, long, two shorts, then fell back on iambics. My material now took twice as many words, and I rolled out Spenserian stanzas on Job and Jonah surrounded by recently seen Nantucket scenery. Everything I did was grand, ungrammatical, and had a timeless, hackneyed quality. All this was ended by reading Williams. It was as though some homemade ship, part Spanish galleon, part paddle-wheels, kitchen pots, and elastic bands and worked by hand, had anchored to a filling station.

This is, to me, a fantastic, and well-constructed, paragraph -- he makes the detritus of a dead tradition sound more interesting and polyvalent than most critics make their "live" traditions sound. His litany of obsolete wares could be right out of A Season In Hell, in which Rimbaud writes that he liked "old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling..." The use of the word "ungrammatical" followed by the 7-word sentence hinge that dramatizes RL's conversion is subtle. The phrase "All this was ended by Williams" almost reminds me of the "All the field was lifted..." line that Williams himself wrote about Olson's Projective Verse essay. Trumbull Stickney!

Next, here is Lowell on Williams's idiom. Note the use of the word "exotic," which I think is an accurate way to convey the very alien nature of Williams's use of "speech" in the context of anti-intuitive, quasi "formalist" -- dare I say "futurist" -- lineation:

I have emphasized Williams’s simplicity and nakedness and have no doubt been misleading. His idiom comes from many sources, from speech and reading, both of various kinds; the blend, which is his own invention, is generous and even exotic. Few poets can come near to his wide clarity and dashing rightness with words, his dignity and almost Alexandrian modulations of voice. His short lines often speed up and simplify hugely drawn out and ornate sentence structures. I once typed out his direct but densely observed poem, “The Semblables,” in a single prose paragraph. Not a word or its placing had been changed, but the poem has changed into a piece of smothering, magnificent rhetoric, much more like Faulkner than the original Williams.

One might almost think that Williams, who wanted to learn from the American idiom of his times, was all about simple sentence structures in the ideologically-tinged reading of his attention to "plain speech." I've always contended that Williams had little to do with "plain speech," which seems to me a hangover from Puritan times when our souls (like the economy of a "rogue nation") were supposed to be transparent.

I was under the impression that the autobiographical free verse poems of Life Studies were the clearest indication of the effect of the Beats on Lowell's poetry, but the following suggests otherwise. I trust any poet who is honest about their conversions, including those who seem intent on changing their mind if only to keep it alive. The question, then, is how to keep a poem alive -- here's one story (this could almost be a section from Eileen Tabios's excellent, probably utterly forgotten, Black Lightning -- look it up!). I thought "Skunk Hour" was a fantastic poem when growing up and still do:

“Skunk Hour” was begun in mid-August 1957 and finished about a month later. In March of the same year, I had been giving readings on the West Coast, often reading six days a week and sometimes twice on a single day. I was in San Francisco, the era and setting of Allen Ginsberg and all about, very modest poets were waking up prophets. I became sorely aware of bow few poems I had written, and that these few had been finished at the latest three or four years earlier. Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult. I began to paraphrase my Latin quotations, and to add extra syllables to a line to make it clearer and more colloquial. I felt my old poems hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humorless, and even impenetrable surface. I am no convert to the “beats.” I know well, too, that the best poems are not necessarily poems that read aloud. Many of the greatest poems can only be read to one’s self, for inspiration is no substitute for humor, shock, narrative, and a hypnotic voice, the four musts for oral performance. Still, my own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor. I was reciting what I no longer felt. What influenced me more than San Francisco and reading aloud was that for some time I had been writing prose. I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert. When I returned to my home, I began writing lines in a new style. No poem, however, got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. Suddenly, in August, I was struck by the sadness of writing nothing, and having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language. When I began writing “Skunk Hour,” I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance.

Here's a type of self-criticism that I would hope becomes addictive (not least with me). How many poets do you know who call their knowledge a "hindrance"? And if this is just a sign of manic depressiveness, then I don't know what to say except the depths, at times, are productive of useful confrontations with one's ego. Is this the writing of a person who was tied to (in Silliman's words) "presumptions about 'what poetry should be.'" (BTW, Has anyone ever noticed how James Schuyler's elegy for Frank O'Hara, "Buried At Springs," is practically indistinguishable, metrically and tonally, from a Life Studies poem. Sheik it out!)

Lastly, here is Lowell on the "poetry wars." Reading the following gives me the impression that Ron Silliman's contention that the "school of quietude" is performing literary CPR by buttressing the collected Lowell -- they probably are, but who cares? -- can be countered by a contention that Silliman is performing a similar service -- by reviving the "poetry wars" he and other "New Americans" (the values of the Language poets don't seem to play a large role here) are able to don the old Cold War armor and appear rather fresh again. This is just a suspicion, and certainly there is no reason to "care" about this either, but alas I can't get over the nagging feeling that these forms of balkanization are stripping the poetry culture of an ability to think subtly through complex issues.

A seemingly unending war has been going on for as long as I can remember between Williams and his disciples and the principals and disciples of another school of modern poetry. The Beats are on one side, the university poets are on the other. Lately [in the sixties] the gunfire has been hot. With such un likely Williams recruits as Karl Shapiro blasting away, it has become unpleasant to stand in the middle in a position of impartiality.

The war is an old one for me. In the late thirties, I was at Kenyon College to study under John Crowe Ransom. The times hummed with catastrophe and ideological violence, both political and aesthetical. The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backward-looking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar. Students who wanted to write got little practical help from their professors. They studied the classics as monsters that were slowly losing their fur and feathers and leaking a little sawdust. What one did oneself was all chance and shallowness, and no profession seemed wispier and less needed than that of the poet. My own group, that of Tate and Ransom, was all for the high discipline, for putting on the full armor of the past, for making poetry something that would take a man’s full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety. Almost anything, the Greek and Roman classics, Elizabethan dramatic poetry, seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, old and modern critics, aestheticians and philosophers, could be suppled up and again made necessary. The struggle perhaps centered on making the old metrical forms usable again to express the depths of one’s experience.

For us, Williams was of course part of the revolution that had renewed poetry, but he was a byline. Opinions varied on his work. It was something fresh, secondary, and minor, or it was the best that free verse could do. He was the one writer with the substance, daring, and staying power to make the short free-verse poem something considerable. One was shaken when the radical conservative critic Yvor Winters spoke of Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital” as a finer, more lasting piece of craftsmanship than “Gerontion.”

Well, nothing will do for everyone. It’s hard for me to see how I and the younger poets I was close to could at that time have learned much from Williams. It was all we could do to keep alive and follow our own heavy program. That time is gone, and now young poets are perhaps more conscious of the burden and the hardening of this old formalism. Too many poems have been written to rule. They show off their authors’ efforts and mind, but little more. Often the culture seems to have passed them by. And, once more, Dr. Williams is a model and a liberator. What will come, I don’t know. Williams, unlike, say, Marianne Moore, seems to be one of those poets who can be imitated anonymously. His style is almost a common style and even what he claims for it—the American style. Somehow, written without his speed and genius, the results are usually dull, a poem at best well-made but without breath.

Lowell's Shakespearean approach to the culture wars -- he occupies the role of Prospero in the staging of the Ariels vs. Calibans -- seems, to me, just more trustworthy, at this moment in time (but also that), then the Leninist mode of aligning forces around some perception of obdurate "class" values (not to mention those of "nation") that are unclear even to those on which you side. Making your enemies out to be utter conformists while all your buddies are free-thinking individualists just never struck me as a good tactic.

I think it's a sign of the even-handedness of "madman" Lowell's approach that he includes this anecdote about Yvor Winters, and it seems to me that Lowell, if anything, hopes only to make this "war" tenable as something of cultural value, were that possible, than to win it! Such a dramatist's flair would be welcome in Silliman's blog. And sad to say, the final line of this excerpt seems to me true of a lot of the writing that RS seems to class under the "school" of plain speech -- few are able to maintain the level of tension that appears in Williams' best work. Silliman may be right that there is a shipwreck occurring, but I'm not sure we are looking at the right shore.

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 8, 2003 10:51 AM | TrackBack