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this is taken from a response written for a class focused on the work of Marianne Moore & Mina Loy
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Moore’s criticism presents another dimension to a very particular way of seeing that we encounter in her poems – a statement in prose on the ways in which a poetic self encounters its world. Of particular interest to me are Moore’s pieces on Williams, in which a tone of friendship and mutual admiration facilitate at once a generous and favorable reading of the doctor-poet and a remarkable projection of Moore’s own approach to poetry, both of which contribute to a deepened understanding of the perpendicularity of Moore’s own verse.
In her review of Kora in Hell, Moore notes the “life[…] in the ability to see resemblances in things which are dissimilar” that characterizes Williams’ work. One senses, thanks to Moore’s reading, the modified mimesis of Williams’ poetry, and it’s in her admiration of his ability to represent his world – a world of Place, of Thing – that we find not so much praise of the poetry but instead of a poetic method, a process through which Williams makes poetic his perceptions. In another piece on Williams, Moore positions him as “essentially not a ‘repeater of things second hand,’” rather a poet capable of “contemplating with new eyes, old things, shabby things, and other things.” It seems to me that this reading of Williams is easily applicable to Moore, whose own poetry manages just such a newness of vision. Williams himself, in his “Marianne Moore,” notes in Moore a coming-at-the-familiar from a “new angle as to throw out of fashion” the poetic conventions of their shared predecessors. Closing the essay in praise, he declares: “This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new, the unbridled leap.” This mutual recognition of remarkable newness, of a clarity and precision of poetic seeing, speaks to a connection between the two poets – that of their shared approach to perception. What is liberating in Williams is equally liberating in Moore: that spark of the novel observation, that making-new of the old and already-seen.
We find the observation of newness also in Moore’s reviews of H.D. and Pound, an almost ecstatic praise of the appearance of a new way of seeing the ancient and the inherited facts of modern culture. With Pound, it’s a newness that comes through textual interpretation, revitalizing the history upon which his poetry is built; with H.D., a radical vision of the so-called natural world that eventually calls into question the gender binary used to define woman-poets in opposition to their male counterparts. It becomes clear, then, that Moore is chiefly concerned not with what is seen, but with how it’s seen, and the ways in which that seeing breathes life into the apparently stagnant, makes interesting the banal.
It’s not so much the emphasis on the new that strikes me as novel, but instead Moore’s particular way of reading the work of her contemporaries. Moore does not ask what or why in her criticism – she asks how. This is not to say that the objects and phenomena central to the work are forgotten or neglected – it’s in fact the opposite. In her criticism, Moore manages to engage in a process almost identical to that which occurs in her poetry: the enactment of a particular method of perception serves to emphasize process while simultaneously illuminating its object.
For the beginning is assuredly
the end– since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
-- W.C. Williams, Paterson
The death of a poet offers a peculiar moment of reflection, wherein the poem itself becomes a final manifestation of the substance of a writer’s lifelong engagement with language – the record of the shared memory of the poet and his reader. Poems resurface, resonant artifacts of his life and acts on the page, various articulations of a particular voice that coalesce to form a complete body of work. The posthumous reading replaces the formerly living body of the poet with the literary corpus; the constellation of experience, lived and written, is finally embodied in the work itself.
Not simply an inactive record of past experimentation, the work is a self-reflective body, a palimpsestic representation of the whole of a poet’s oeuvre. Nearly five years after his death, Robert Creeley’s work shows no evidence of growth, per se, but is instead representative of a consistent, lifelong engagement with a process of projective introspection. The outside always in conversation with the inside, the particulars made always into the general, Creeley’s poems – from the beginning to the end of his career—are examinations of the complexities of perception, as it occurs momently.
Published as On Earth, Creeley’s last poems are the condensation of a life of such examination. A poet without a masterwork, with only one widely anthologized poem, Creeley’s legacy lies in a deftly executed poetry of
pieces, the divers articulations of particular experiences in a precise language of simplicity. On Earth consists of poems that could have easily appeared in the minimalist experiments of his early career. Time, a pervasive theme, is relevant to Creeley’s poems only in its seemingly circular motion. Less circular, in fact, than an overlapping spiral: moments in time seem to exist alongside one another, echoing, speaking in a context of the poetry itself, rather than in a precise temporality. Take, for example, “Which Way”:
Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.
And what’s behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.
Creeley’s questions are punctuated as statements, the implication being that the answer is contained within the inquiry. The employment of this device is an echo of the earlier work; the recurring questions of place, time and human presence, their interactions and effects upon a personal consideration of being-in-time, are approached in their incomprehensibility as self-evident. For Creeley, the precision of language in his poems becomes a means of deciphering the mysteries of content. The question is, has always been, how to make sense of the self in an uncertain setting of expanding space and time. The rarely voiced “I” is referenced only in reflective terms: Creeley’s speaker-self approaches the problem of personal reconciliation through an examination of the unknown externalities of his circumstance. Thus the interrogation of the “you,” its identity, its arrival and point of departure, the trajectory of its movement, is an articulation of Creeley’s curiosity as it pertains to the unknowable. The “you” is one among many unknowns, the manifestation of a projected uncertainty of identity.
An earlier poem, “The Measure,” indicates an early articulation of just such an uncertainty:
I cannot
move backward
or forward.
I am caught
in the time
as measure.
What we think
of we think of ---
of no other reason
we think than
just to think---
each for himself.
The focus shifts to the “I,” its stasis within the confines of time and solitary contemplation. Creeley considers the position of the individual, voiced here as both “I” and “himself,” in terms of an equally static “we.” The immobility of the self-conscious speaker is projected onto an external collectivity, so that the particular aspect of the self is made general. In this case, externality is less representative of a mysterious unknown than a shared inability among the we-self to know anything beyond the I-self’s own thought. That is to say, the only known is the paralytic sense of isolation, a shared condition that unites speaker (“I”) and reader (“we”).
As in “Which Way,” Creeley uncovers the relations between space, time and perception, as they speak to the consciousness-in-isolation. The later poem, however, exhibits a precision of observation that is reflective of a more focused understanding of circumstance. That is to say, the later work represents a condensation of the various aspects of confusion that plague the speaker, reconciling, at least in part, the tensions of fragmentation that characterize his body of work as a whole. The questions are far from resolved, yet the accumulation of experience offers a sharpened clarity of observation – in age, Creeley is able to strip away the excess, articulating his preoccupations with an economy of language that speaks to a maturity of voice not present in the earlier work. Creeley’s growth, then, is exhibited not in a change of theme or tone, but instead in an increased precision of thematic articulation.
Without a sense of finality in any one poem, Creeley’s body of work is a collage of interactive verse, early and late poems conversing on the shared plane of a fragmented collectivity. His beginning is reflected in his end, everything unknown but the fact of the unclear self, composed of self-evident complexities. Thought, space, time, processes of perception – these are all questions, answers in themselves, striving toward a clarity that presents itself only Creeley’s precision of language. Nothing is resolved, not even in death, so that the confused body of Creeley now lives in the confused body of his work.
As I approach the fateful moment of Stating My Purpose as a prospective Ph.D. candidate at various east coast institutions of so-called higher learning, I'm revisiting those texts that pushed me toward my current preoccupations, ones that manifest themselves poetically and politically, the ideas that will likely shape my research & work as a professional intellectual (whatever that means).
My last year at the (sometimes) illustrious Gallatin School was a period of independent research, guided at times by my two intellectual & personal heroes, Rebecca Karl & Antonio Lauria, both of whom offered a way into the dense & fascinating work of some very important dead Communists, who spent sev
eral hours on Monday afternoons and Tuesday evenings discussing the tensions and truths of Maoist and Gramscian dialectics with me, and who showed me that intellectual pursuits are not always masturbatory, that a close-reading of a single turn of phrase could break open a new world of thought never before considered. With RK, I learned how to Read the Revolution, so to speak -- to investigate the ways in which the theory and practice of national liberation, cultural re-formation, & consciousness-raising were reflected in the form and content of the work of Marx, Lenin, Mao & Brecht. With Antonio, there were conversations about the function of language as a living part of the Revolution itself, the process (always process) through which Gramsci constructed and de-constructed his (and the collective) understanding of People as readers, speakers and actors of the Revolution. RK offered a structured, faithful reading of Great (Revolutionary) Books; Antonio was a friend & comrade with whom I could work through my own difficulties, academic or otherwise, with the Revolution as an idea and a living thing.
Their influence affected my personal out-of-classroom readings of the so-called 1st- and 2nd Generation Modernists, & allowed me to draw connections between their theoretical and practical exercises in the development of an American Voice & the Revolutionary work of my Marxist-Leninist influences. Almost every week, Antonio would remind me of Gramsci's famous emphasis on "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," the dialectical relation between criticism and hope, and I would excitedly paraphrase a line from Williams, a paragraph of Olson. When I crossed the stage at Lincoln Center, my fist thrown in the air in acceptance of my B.A. in Poetics and Revolution, I was thinking of Gramsci, of Mao, of Williams & Olson, of my comrades, alive & dead, in the always-changing & constant Struggle, unnamed & waiting for a new Voice.
Now, revisiting those ideas that shaped my concentration at Gallatin -- ideas that earned me a reputation as a shouting Maoist, a chain-smoking & rambling poet, an anachronism in an intellectual community emphasizing post-structural theorizations of prose & the unspoken & insurmountable coercion of a monolithic System -- I'm reassured that structure is necessary, and that 
we as Americans have a language with which to speak, a language that is our own, and that we must reclaim in the face of fragmentation & institutionalized decentralization of thought and identity. These are the lessons I learned as an undergraduate, lessons I'm beginning to recall at a crucial and necessary moment:
Language is ALIVE. It is not a mediator or a mirror. It is as much a participant in the construction of our cultural consciousness as the breath that manages to keep us living among each other and ourselves.
and BREATH, that is the key: the rhythm, the space, the silence that's full, always, of what's been said, what will be said, what IS said. (Curse the passive voice, inherited & emphasized)
INHERITANCE is not merely to be accepted, but must be considered critically. We must dig into the past to understand what shaped the things we've inherited. Capitalism. Formalism. The iamb, the trochee. (These rules of poetry extend -- the measured & constrained approach to consumption, the veil that covers the social relations of labor -- ask our President for an answer to rampant unemployment & you'll get a beautiful sonnet in response, an inherited answer to a question that seems to refuse to change.)
Change, which does not simply happen, but is instead MADE. By people. On the ground & on the page. We should not wait for a handsome senator from Chicago to deliver it, nor should we turn to the Mothers and Fathers of our form to offer it in the pages of the Paris Review. The longer we wait, the later it'll come.
I'm also reminded that there are, in fact, very real ties between such seemingly disparate characters as William Carlos Williams and Mao Tse-tung. Evidence:
The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode. There has to be new poetry. But the thing is that the change, the greater material, the altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem, in it. Made of it. It must shine in the structural body of it. [WCW]
The supersession of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe... In each thing there is contradiction between its new and its old aspects, and this gives ruise to a series of struggles with many twists and turns. [Mao]
By repeating an early misconception it gains acceptance and may be found running through many, or even all, later work. It has to be rooted out at the site of its first occurrence. [WCW]
Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition -- from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. [Mao]
If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use -- that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy -- their own world differing as it may from mine... That is what is meant by the universality of the local. [WCW]
It is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides. [Mao]
They lack that which must draw them together -- without destruction of their particular characteristics; the thing that will draw them together because in their disparateness it discovers an identity. [WCW]
So to state it. The purpose. Here it is:
TO DIG, to discover the contradictions that propel the motion of history In the American Grain, to unearth the parallels and intersections of individual experience that will give rise to a unified voice, to examine (closely) the victories and failures of the poetic Revolutionaries of the American 20th century, so that we, the inheritors of their language & culture, may move forward with our own contradictory experience and being with a more full & complex understanding of that which came before. Because before we can understand the present, before we can create the future, we must -- MUST -- understand what came before.
It's Sankofa. It's my favorite pome:
If we go back to where
we never were we'll
be there [REPEAT] But
What great tragedy is the life of the petty-bourgeois intellectual! What a profound struggle he faces in descent from the ivory tower! To be the tallest among the small, a Man with Ideas among just-plain-men, is to be plagued with the contradictory consciousness that's driven so many to isolation & crisis. O desperate confusion! O woe! Pity the great & privileged thinking man!
In his Between Existentialism and Marxism Jean-Paul Sartre makes the astute observation that class consciousness may only be attained through direct experience of class conflict. That's to say, one cannot identify with the class struggle without first participating therein. This is a clear application of the dialectical method of analysis. Theory & practice are dialectically linked, so that one may not exist
without the other. One cannot understand the proletarian circumstance until one experiences it, wholly & directly.
So where, in the equation of class struggle & consciousness, does that place the Thinking Man of Privilege?
Let's consider a hypothetical situation. A young, petty-bourgeois intellectual is exposed, on paper, to the central tenets of Marxist philosophy. He reads excerpts from Capital, he analyses State & Revolution for a week or two. He has some conversations with other, more well-read students of Marxism-Leninism. He has a degree from a prestigious institution of higher education. There is money in his bank account & he has few material responsibilities. Most importantly, he does not have to work for a living. But, in search of experience & adventure, he decides to take a job as an unskilled laborer, a worker in an assembly line. There, he works among the People, whose lives depend upon the meager wages earned with their daily toil. These People among whom he exists are uneducated by comparison, but they are far more practically skilled than the intellectual. He earns, like his comrades, less than a living wage in this position, and he quickly grows frustrated with his circumstance. He believes that the practical skills he is learning are less valuable than the metaphysical lessons of experience learned by his cosmopolitan intellectual predecessors. Materiality, in other words, is subordinated to the pleasures of thought. "My time is worth more than this," he says, "because I have read thick books! I have written long analyses of the meaning of sexual penetration in the Modern bildungsroman! I will no longer exploit my body & waste my valuable time for an industry in which I do not believe!"
He quits his job. His fellow workers, however, cannot quit their own. They have bills to pay, and no other marketable skills. Principles are of secondary concern, because of the material urgency of survival. In short, they are locked into their situation. He is not. He is free, because of his padded bank account & bourgeois mindset, to walk away from the assembly line & devote his time to thought & introspection. He is a lucky man, he thinks, because he has learned the Truth of Class Consciousness, and he goes to sleep with a smile on his face & hope for the future, now armed with an understanding of the Plight of the Worker. He may think of the men who once worked alongside him, but only in passing, & in the context of their proletarian charm, the wisdom they've acquired in their noble savagery. They are footnotes in the novel of his life, anecdotal characters used to add color to the philosophical musings of his autobiographical narrative.
But he has worked, he tells himself, worked hard, for a week or a month, perhaps even a year, and has therefore paid his dues. He believes that he has earned the right to speak of class, when in fact, he knows little of the struggle to which he refers. Someday, when a revolutionary movement develops around him, he will sit at his desk & write long essays on the value of the worker in society. He will sign petitions & organize sit-ins. He will raise his fist at rallies & shout slogans with his fellow intellectuals, but he will not set foot in the trenches of the true struggle. He will not give up his privilege, because he believes he has already given up enough, by working for a moment among those he supports from afar, whose fingers are bleeding from overwork. And he will never sacrifice his luxury, because he cannot let go of his bourgeois intellectualism. His degree is always in the back of his mind, always a reminder of his arbitrary superiority, no matter how sure he is of its meaninglessness. He will never have to strike for shorter work-days or better health benefits. He will never have to look his children in the eye and tell them there will be no food on the table tonight, or any night this week. And because of this, he will never fully understand the struggle, and can never claim a knowledge of that struggle. He has no right to it. It is not his to claim.
And yet we petty-bourgeois intellectuals claim the struggle daily. We understand the ideas, the philosophies, the grand, sweeping generalizations of our thoughtful predecessors who classified & identified the masses to whom they had never spoken. And because of this understanding, we are somehow imbued with a right to speak of the Revolution, though the fight will never be our own. Our sympathy is not empathy. Our interest is not in shared experience, but in analysis & observation. At best, we are anthropologists in the field, taking notes. We live among the natives, always looking through the lenses we've learned to value as tools of comprehension, never stopping to think that dirty hands & callused fingers may actually be the key to understanding.
Those who have the choice to live without are different from those who live without choice itself. No matter how many pages of Marxist-Leninist theory I read, no matter how much research I perform on the experience of the CCP during the Long March, I will never know the truth of struggle until I am forced, without choice, to be exploited. To choose exploitation as a means of enriching one's experience of The World & its processes is to negate the struggle of those who are & will continue to be exploited ad infinitum. It is not noble to sacrifice one's privilege unless it is sacrificed completely, unless luxury and caution are thrown to the wind & the mind is wiped clean of its philosophical clutter.
I do not pretend to be strong enough to throw away the books & surrender completely to the circumstance with which I am chiefly concerned. And because of this fact, I have no right to speak of the essence of class consciousness, of great & explosive revelations of Truth. Because of this, I am not dangerous, because I am aware of my inexperience, & embrace it as a challenge that must be faced, a step in the process that leads toward the acquisition of Revolutionary Consciousness. The dangerous ones are those who claim consciousness that is not their own, who assert correctness without first having sought the validation of experience.
In closing, the wise words of two philosophers of experience, one a Chinese revolutionary, the other a doctor-poet from New Jersey.
No ideas but in things / There is no knowledge without practice
After several years as a reader & writer of poetry, I have begun what may become the great study of my young life. I have embarked upon a journey through the life and work of Charles Olson, American poet & father of the postmodern. The study is centered on The Maximus Poems, widely considered Olson's masterwork, a series of over 300 poems composed over the space of twenty years. I had initially intended to tackle the Cantos of Ezra Pound, but fear & a stronger interest in Olson led me to Maximus (whether I was dissuaded by Pound's violent fascism or the impenetrability of the text is unclear; it's likely a combination of the two). After several readings of Paterson, William Carlos Williams' own epic of the American experience, Maximus seems like a logical next step. Olson is something of an inheritor of the Williams tradition; his theory of Projective Verse & general approach to poetics are both reflections of and expansions upon Williams' idea of the American Idiom & poetics of the variable foot. While Olson owes a great deal to his poetic predecessors (Pound & Williams both), Maximus asserts itself as a text of true originality, an exploration in fragments & full compositions of the questions of self & nation that characterized Olson's life.
Following a surface reading of the text during a quiet weekend in Vermont, I returned to Brooklyn armed with George Butterick's Guide to The Maximus Poems & Tom Clark's comprehensive (if somewhat biased) biography of the poet, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, with the somewhat daunting goal of close-reading & annotating Maximus. The project involves an examination of as much related textual material as possible, including other poems, supplementary biographical accounts, correspondence and Olson's prose writing. Because Maximus nearly consumed Olson's life during the twenty years of its creation, and because Olson was one of the most intellectually curious figures of his time, the project has grown in scale since it began a few weeks ago. Inspired by Olson's own research methods as a young academic writing his analysis of Moby-Dick, the book-length essay Call Me Ishmael, I am interested not only in the text of Maximus itself, but also as much of the material surrounding the poems as is accessible. Following my completion of the annotative process, I'll have more clear ideas about the direction the study will follow, but at present I am primarily interested in one of Olson's most pervasive assertions: that of the power of the individual, both within & outside the collective consciousness. Note this excerpt from "Letter 6," which begins (beautifully) "polis is/ eyes":
And the few-- that goes, even inside the major
economics. It is not true that the many,
even in fishing, say, Gloucester,
are the gauge
Truth, for Olson, lies in the subjective perception of the individual. The collectivization & universalization of experience, the generalization of image in pursuit of "accessibility" are abhorrent to the poet, whose entire poetic (and, according to Clark, personal) life was devoted to the assertion of Self, & the surmounting of influence.
But Olson is far from solipsistic, & continuously asserts a consciousness of the World outside the Self:
There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
So each individual has the capacity to See, to reflect the experience of his polis in his own perception of the world outside.
Thirty-five pages in, this is what stands out. We'll see where the study leads, but at this precise moment in my experience of Olson, these assertions of the power of individual perception are terribly influential. Each day is another challenge to live to the fullest in the Olsonian "Human Universe," to absolutely surrender the self to its surrounding particulars, to experience the world through always-open eyes, and to reject, persistently, all generalization. Ambitious? Maybe. Exciting? Absolutely.
