E. E. Cummings

If a poet is anybody he is somebody to whom things made matter very little---
somebody who is obsessed by Making.”
Cummings, introduction to Is 5 (1926).

E. E. Cummings reputation always precedes him. He was a gadabout, a busybody, a fly by night, an operator, an early and more sentimental Charles Bukowski, a lover and a madman too. Sometimes he was said to be a pornographer. However, Cummings books from the Twenties display the thought and feelings of a serious writer and a serious man. He was later to be photographed with pink plush toy elephants, but in the Twenties, he worked hard. Everything he wrote was experimental, different, new, visual. He combined words, cut them in half, was cavalierly and faithfully innovative with line breaks and disrupted every line and thought if he could. He was also often funny. Cummings was first recognized for the candor and clarity of his “war memoir” The Enormous Room, published by Boni & Liveright in 1922 and reprinted with corrections in 1927 (after Cummings had become more famous). It is a book of disillusion and disenchantment, a book of the individual against the state, an anti-war book. In 1933 after a trip to the Soviet Union, which similarly disillusioned him as it had many before and after, Cummings produced an equally cogent account, Eimi (Covici Friede, 1933). During the Twenties Cummings published three books of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (T. Selzer, 1922), XLI Poems (Dial Press, 1925) and Is 5 (Boni & Liveright, 1926). During the first two years of the Thirties, he produced three more, By E. E. Cummings (Covici-Friede, 1930), CIOPW (Covici-Friede0 and VV: Viva (Liveright) both published in 1931. It is largely upon this amazing outpouring that his reputation should rest.

Mayhew Questions 1-7

1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?

Poetry began with Homer? Sappho burning. Horace, Virgil, Catullus.
Chaucer, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Pope, Dryden, Shelley, Keats, Byron, etc. You know.

The Chinese Tang poets: Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei.

The Spanish and Latin Americans Gongora, Sor Juana, John of the Cross, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Cernuda.

The French, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Tzara, Breton, Eluard, Peret, Max Ernst (what else, the Hundred Headless Woman, The Lion of Belfort) Ponge, Guillvec, Bonnefoy

Celan.

Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Creeley
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore
Berryman, Jarrell, Lowell, Bishop
O'Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler
Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer
Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman
Eileen Myles
Barbara Guest, Ann Lauterbach
James Wright, Robert Bly
Amy Clampitt, May Swenson
Fanny Howe
Ron Silliman
Charles Bernstein
Brenda Hillman
Robert Hass

This is defined by an active, colorfull, interesting, idiosyncratic, mystical, material use of language. A spark of experiment and a sense of the thrill of words on their own, with their own intensity and wild life.

The mixture of the so called avant garde and the so called mainstream in my personal history of poetry probably distinguishes me more from my closest poetic collaborators.

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alongside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

Paratactic, eccentric, sometimes funny, sense of the river of literature, of the history of literature and of history. Uncertain, ambiguous, exploratory.

Everything occupies all corners always. Crowded.

3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?

Clark Coolidge, Ann Lauterbach. They are hard. Smart, bright, inventive. Neurotic.
I like "difficult'" poetry though. I am more and more irritated by the continuing call for "clear" poetry. Nothing is clear, least of all poetry.


4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"? Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?

Yes we are. No it is not. Same thing. Opposites, rivals, too.

5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?

Poetry is life.
Danger, Danger Will Robinson.

6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious categtory?

Borges, Kerouac, DeLillo, Doris Lessing, Francine Prose, Denis Johnson, Andrea Barrett, Rick Moody, they are all poets aren't they? Sam Shepard, Albee?

7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?

Wit and Humor are basic. Irony is less so and incredibly dangerous, contaminating and coruscating. Ha.

In Memorium

"I wanted the poem itself to exist and that could never be possible as long as some subject significantly elsewhere was involved. There had to be an independence derived from the very fact that words are things too. Poems gave me access to this fact more than any other possibilty in language. . . . The poem is not a signboard, pointing to content ultimately to be regarded: but is on the contrary, a form inhabited by intelligence and feeling." Robert Creeley

Longfellow's Dante

America's beloved “Fireside Poet” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-92) was also a prodigious translator, from many languages, including German, French and Italian. His first collection of poetry Voices of the Night, was published in 1839 with translations of some stanzas from Dante's Purgatorio. His version in unrhymed tercets of the The Divine Comedy was published in 1867. It is among the most faithfully literal translations of Dante ever made (“The only merit my book has it that it is exactly what Dante says, and not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an Englishman.”). Nevertheless his version is replete with wonderfully musical passages as well as many which are marred by silly archaisms and unfortunate infelicities. Longfellow lectured on Dante and was a devoted member of the Nineteenth Century Dante Club at Harvard where he taught for 18 years. In one of his lectures he describes Dante's great work as reminding him of

“ . . . the Roman aqueducts, built solidly with those stanzas, like blocks of granite, piled one upon the other, and not cemented together, but held in their places by their own weight and the clamps of the rhyme. Magnificent and beautiful structure! As you stand beneath it, you can hear the living waters of song flowing on from century to century.”

Schuyler again

Schuyler's poems can sometimes stop readers in their tracks - not because of any infelicitous choice of word, or the dull drop of a participle, but from sheer and joyful surprise (“I keep my Diamond necklace in a pond of sparkling water for invisibility”). A master of the sudden and unusual intrusion (of another state of consciousness, a flamboyant character, or an elegant twist of fate), Schuyler was a postmodern nature poet, who wrote convincingly of the weather, of garden flowers, and of “malevolent argeratums,” carefully noting “a too pungent salad” and “the smoke blazing over Jersey.” Everything and everyone in his sometimes skinny poems is clearly, tenderly observed: “All things are real/no one a symbol.” Schuyler was also a careful observer in a meditative way of living life in the city:

The Morning

breaks in splendor on
the window glass of
the French doors to
the shallow balcony
of my room with a
cast iron balustrade
in a design of flowers,
mechanical and coarse
and painted black:
sunburst of a coolish
morning in July. I
almost accept the fact
that I am not in
the country,, where I
long to be, but in
this place of glass
and stone-and metal,
let's not forget
metal-where traffic sounds and the day
is well begun. So
be it, morning.

As an observer, Schuyler partakes of a postmodern type of buddhist, or quietest christian calmness
and hope in the face of no hope:

Things should get better as you
grow older, but that
is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to handle.
-----from "A Few Days"

Robert Bly

Robert Bly read and talked at Tempe's Changing Hands Bookstore
last Thursday evening. He was really charming, and his reading style
was very attractive. Easy going, familiar (I would imagine Mark Twain
was a little like this). Reading short poems twice really helps you to
hear what you are hearing.His interjections in the form of exhortations or
explanations also helped one listen. The poems he read from his new book
were really nice (funny, smart ghazal like poems, two of which are
in the current Poetry magazine). He also read a number of translations
which were particularly affecting. Bly handed out free copies of his
anti Iraq book, which pleased a number of the crowd immensely.
Hmmmm. The crowd was mostly older, with no more than a half
dozen under 40. But about seventy five people in all were in the
audience crowded into the reading area of the bookstore. People
loved his jokes.

Genevieve Taggard

“In the little church my parents attended in Honolulu I was impressed with the text, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." When we sat listening I had only to move my eyes from the minister to see outside the flowering vines and colored trees of abundance. Nevertheless, or perhaps because we lived a rich sensuous life, the text became my own. I have never ceased to think that the text, taken literally, should be the aim of all governments. I scoff at those who tell me solemnly that government must be something else. I am not interested in anything else. . .”
Genevieve Taggard, “Preface to Origin: Hawaii (1947)

Born in 1894 to school teacher/missionaries, radical poet Genevieve Taggard attended high school in Hawaii where her first poem was published and she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1920, taking six years due to the need to work to support her family. The hardship of her early life and the social commitment of her parents are reflected in her poetry, which shares a passionate concern for the rights and welfare of the working classes and a dedication to proletarian and feminist causes.

Taggard published a dozen collections of poetry and several chapbooks, including Not Mine to Finish; Poems 1928-1934 (1934), Calling Western Union (1936) and Slow Music (1946) all published by Harper. Taggard was a supporter and enthusiast for poetry, founding and editing Measure: a magazine of verse, with Padraic Colum and Maxwell Anderson and served as a contributing editor to the New Masses in the thirties. She also edited four anthologies, Continent's End, an Anthology of California Verse published in 1925 (with George Sterling and James Rorty, May Days: an anthology of verse from Masses/Liberator (1925), Circumference, varieties of metaphysical experience (1929) and Ten Introductions, with Dudley Fitts (1934). Taggard was in part responsible for the “discovery” of Emily Dickinson, contributing an early biography. She also taught at Bennington College from 1932-1935 and at Sarah Lawrence College for ten years until 1946, when she was forced to retire under mysterious circumstances. She died on November 8, 1948, having “rolled like a marble,” from New York to Vermont with Capri and South Hadley, Massachusetts in between.

Although her earlier books For Eager Lovers (Selzer, 1922) and Words for the Chisel (Knopf, 1926) were composed of mostly love lyrics, Traveling Still: Poems 1918-1928 (Knopf, 1928) includes several poems that prefigure her later socially conscious poetry of the thirties. That later body of work, in particular Calling Western Union (Harper, 1936) provides a vivid and important record of a socially radical woman's life, unfortunately marginalized and buried by the critical hegemony of the New Critics at mid-century. Although poets as diverse as Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, William Rose Benet and Josephine Miles appreciated her work, even during her own time there was some tendency during her own time to depreciate her work for the directness of expression of her social themes. This “repression' even continued recently with Marjorie Perloff's uncharacteristic and unexplainable little attack on Taggard in her review of Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial. (Although I will write anonymous confessions for The Nation.) That is her story--and her second defeat. She thinks I owed her a Christian gentlewoman, for all she did for me. We quarrel. After I escaped, she snapped shut the iron trap around my brother and sister. That is their story. I do not know if they will ever be free of her. She keeps Eddie Guest on the parlor table beside the books I have written--a silent protest against me. She is not pleased.”
Genevieve Taggard, “Poet out of Pioneer,” The Nation (1927)

Bernadette

“And language the false start to love it is, how unknown it is,
Leaping and flying into the cold, we breathe”
. . . . . .

Lewis' mother says we're snobs, we think only about poetry"

---Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day

Chris Burden/Bruce Nauman

THROUGH THE NIGHT SOFTLY, Main Street, Los Angeles, September 12, 1973:

Holding my hands behind my back, I crawled through fifty feet of glass.
There were very few spectators, most of them passersby. This piece was
documented with a 16mm film.

---Chris Burden, Arts, March, 1975

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A Wax Mold of the Knees of Five Famous Artists.

Although it's made out of fiberglass, and they are my knees. I couldn't decide who to get for artists, so I used my own knees. Making the impressions of the knees in a wax block was a way of having a large rectangular solid with marks on it. I didn't want just to make marks in it, so I had to follow another kind of reasoning. It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at. That is, you had to know what it is about, too. To go and look at it was to try and thin k whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had to know these other things too.

---Bruce Nauman, interview with Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker, 1967

Zoo Music

William D. Waltz. Zoo Music. Brooklyn, Slope Editions, 2004.


There are a great many nice poem's in Zoo Music, the first book of Minneapolitan William D. Waltz. Of the thirty-three poems in this small book over half of them are affecting, gracious, the best of them effecting a series of unbroken gestures arriving at the a quite epiphany by way of smoothly orchestrated digressions. Here is an example, almost all of “Opposite the Phantom Limb”:

“If mountain aspens could be astounded
To discover chloroplasts quivering,
Like roe on a windshield,
At extremities of summer lush
Or master carpenters dumbfounded
By the galvanized claws
Of a hammer in a red cell's deadend,
then someone ought to be surprised,
Still, by collages, legs attached to cherries
Or fishes, or by words
Pasted by digital fingers, dexterous,
Acid free, aping, infatuated.”

Creating linguistic texture

From C. K. Ogden's Preface to James Joyce/Tales Told/of Shem and Shaun
(Paris, The Black Sun Press, Rue Cardinale, MCMXXIX)

There are ten main ways in which symbolic texture can be complicated and
comapacted:

Root cultivation
Tongue-gsture
Rhyme-slang
Analogical deformation
Onomatopoeia, phonetic and kinetic
Puns, select and dialect
Spoonerisms
Condensations
Mergers
Echoes

TuFu

TuFu
Ballad of the Old Cypress

In front of K'ung-ming Shrine
stands an old cypress,
With branches like green bronze
and roots like granite;

Its hoary bark, far round,
glistens with raindrops,
And blueblack hues, high up,
blend in with Heaven's:
Long ago Statesman, King
kept Time's appointment,
But still this standing tree has men's devotion;

United with the mists
of ghostly gorges,
Through which the moon brings cold
from snowy mountains.

(I recall near my hut
on Brocade River
Another Shrine is shared by
King and Statesman

On civil, ancient plains
with stately cypress:
The paint there now is dim,
windows shutterless. . .)

Wide, wide though writhing roots
maintain its station,
Far, far in lonely heights,
many's the tempest

When its hold is the strength
of Divine Wisdom
And straightness by the work of the Creator. . .

Yet if a crumbling Hall
needed a rooftree, Yoked herds would, turning heads,
balk at this mountain:

By art still unexposed all have admired it;
But axe though not refused,
who could transport it?

How can its bitter core deny ants lodging,
All the while scented boughs
give Phoenix housing?

Oh, ambitious unknowns,
sigh no more sadly:
Using timber as big
was never easy!

This poem was recited by the Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky to commemorate President Clinton's visit to China on PBS July 1998.