Of Chance and the Poets We Read, Establishments, and Other Things (David Matthews)

Those familiar with me only through a few interviews and essays may well wonder if I have read anyone of more recent vintage than the Beats. In truth no one since the Beats has made a comparable impact. I was struck by Camille Paglia's remark, at her appearance at Powell's in Portland back in the spring of 2005, that while researching Break, Blow, Burn she found no great poetry written in the second half of the twentieth century, even among poets she likes. There is much that is well-crafted, clever, ironic, but little that touches us deeply. Maybe ours is a time of minimal poetry, or maybe it is that the great themes tend not to be tackled by the poets with the greatest visibility, the ones who win the awards and ensconce themselves as professors of poetry and conductors of writing workshops and are published by the university presses of the nation.

I imagine there are a number of poets writing today I would enjoy if I came upon them, but there is such an incredible proliferation of poets, small press publishers, and magazines, both in print and online, that even the most dedicated reader would be hard-pressed to take in more than a smattering of them. For someone still working his way through the tradition, it is an especially daunting task. As Harold Bloom is fond of pointing out, at this late date there is simply not time to read everything we want to read, not to mention that the really good stuff is worth reading slowly and carefully and several, if not many, times over. We will never catch up.

So much of it comes down to Fortuna's roll of the dice. Most of us first encountered the poets of the Anglo-American tradition in school. As for the others, you meet a poet in a bar who is smitten with Berryman and has large chunks of Dreamsongs committed to memory. So you come to Berryman. Another time, you are taken with a young woman who recommends Vallejo. So of course you check him out, and not just for the sake of the poetry. Someone asks if you have ever read Rilke. No. You should. An old college pal tells you about Bukowski. It happens like that.

It all goes back to when Mom took a job as secretary at the local high school, where she became close friends with the principal's wife, which is how I met my buddy Phil. I was about twelve at the time. This would have been in the mid 1960s. Phil had a short-wave radio on which he listened to English-language broadcasts from Radio Havana and Radio Peking, as what we now call "Beijing" was transliterated in those days. He corresponded with the commies, and they sent him all sorts of cool stuff, propaganda, posters, a Cuban flag. There is no question that exposure to these other perspectives, however slanted, as I knew even then they were, along with the Civil Rights movement and my personal witness of racial prejudice and discrimination, led to an openness to question the official U.S. version of things, for instance, the deepening military involvement in Southeast Asia, of which I was just beginning to be aware. These seminal influences remain with me.

A few years later Phil and I would drive into Columbia on Saturday afternoons to hit the Richland Country Public Library. Science fiction was our focus, but we had a taste for science, history, biography, and politics as well. One afternoon in 1968 or '69 our young eyes were struck by a book on the new arrivals shelf with a wild cover and a title we did not know what to make of: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. What in the wide world could that be about? The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test led to Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. From there I picked up on Jack Kerouac when his name kept popping up in articles about Kesey in magazines like Rolling Stone and Time. Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, with whom I was already familiar, led to the other Beats, who in writings and interviews dropped names like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, names that led to the French Surrealists and, more generally, international poetry of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. This was the poetry that drew me to poetry.

Ginsberg and Kerouac reacted against an establishment that entrenched itself in the 1930s, described by Kenneth Rexroth in a 1969 interview:

Between the wars, an extraordinary combination of Ku Kluxers and bankrupt Trotskyites in New York dominated American literature, and made it totally provincial. American literature was back where it was before the Revolutionary War. It was a provincial imitation of English baroque literature.... It had no connection.

Since most of the people, except the Southern Agrarians, had been one-time Stalinists, they just took over all the techniques of Stalinism...you know, hatchet reviews and logrolling and wire-pulling and controls of foundations and academic jobs and so forth...they had the thing absolutely by the balls, just like the Commies had had it just before them. If you got in the Partisan Review you could put up your little pattie and get a job on any English faculty in the U.S.A.

We fought these people continuously...a lot of them had been taking exercises so that they could keep fit when they were put in the prisons during the coming war, the Imperialist War, and what happened? They were all in the OSS and now the CIA. They all were! Every single...one of them was! Name anyone that wasn't! I know all of these people. They were all chairborne [sic] on a gravy train of human blood.... Once I pinned the name "Pillowcase Head Press School of Literature" on Red [Robert Penn] Warren and Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, it stuck! You have no idea the domination of these people.

Today we have a different establishment. In a development analogous to what Rexroth describes between the wars, many infantile leftists of the 1960s have become the infantile rightists of the new century. Rexroth says elsewhere in the same interview, "You go to any university today and you are up to your ass in poets." This was 1969. Nowadays the M.F.A. programs and the writing workshop racket churn out poets who write with perfect competence without having anything to say, and they have the contacts, the connections, the networking, to land the teaching jobs, score the grants, and have their books published. This is not to argue that one cannot work in the university and write meaningful poetry, only that few do. Meantime, people committed to learning, teaching, and the intellectual adventure, devoted to the musty old ideal of a liberal education, face an uphill struggle against careerists, mediocrities, budget pressures, and those who push for universities to be little more than glorified trade schools whose mission is to churn out a docile corporate workforce according to the dictates of the economic order.

Across the grim divide the new generation of holy barbarians rages in its turn, Ginsbergians, Bukowskians, poetry slammers, young and full of piss and vinegar, passionate, caring, but many with a ways yet to go on the poetry end of it. Discouraged as I sometimes get, I take heart because I know that among their number and in the schools, too, are those who read Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vallejo and Neruda, who go back to Shakespeare and Milton, and know who Diane di Prima and Bob Kaufman are. I see them reading The Idiot on the bus and lining up for the NW Film Center's Pedro Almodóvar retrospective. I have to believe this counts for something. Hope springs infernal.

This is a slightly revised version of an essay that originally appeared on my blog Memo from the Fringes 26 June 2005.

Comments

[Joseph Armstead]

David, this is a truly interesting, exceeding well-written and intelligent piece. You make your points simply and directly with grace and elegance! And I appreciate the historical and literary references that allow the reader to associate the politics of time & place with your train of thought.

Excellent work!

[aurora]

I love seeing articles with something like this addressed in more depth than you can give in a quick little interview. Well done, David! Very interesting indeed.

[Matt]

Dude, this is a quality essay. Enjoyed.

[David Matthews]

Thank you for your comments. I really appreciate them and am grateful to Magnapoets for making this forum available.