My Poetic History

In high school, which is as far back as I care to go at the moment I was keen on poetry. Not only the classics (taught “old school” in an all boys Christian Brothers of Ireland school in a Detroit suburb), but as soon as I caught wind of the Beats I was onto them. I remember having a thing for Yevtushenko though I’m not sure how much the fact that he was Russian (i.e. it was rebellious to like him during the Cold War) impacted my taste. Of course I liked e. e. cummings (he ruined my capitalization for life), but when Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind” came out, I thought, wow, I’m a beatnik. Ginsberg came a bit later, but in high school (I graduated in 1968) I was clearly affiliated with the Beats and even went to the local coffee house, The Raven, to hear folk music like Jim and Jean, and Tom Rush (the second or third string folk rockers).

So all of this, and on top of it, Theatre of the Absurd (Ionesco et al), existentialist film (Bergman), and Simon and Garfunkel.
Okay.

When I went to the U of Michigan I met my mentor, RG, anthropology grad student, filmmaker, and poet (prose-poetry) in the Black Mountain school which included Charles Olson (as king) and Robert Duncan (also Robert Kelly…oh, hell, here’s the Wiki entry

Projective verse

In 1950, Olson published his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem. This form was to be based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance. The content was to consist of "one perception immediately and directly (leading) to a further perception". This essay was to become a kind of de facto manifesto for the Black Mountain poets. One of the effects of narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an utterance was that the Black Mountain poets developed a distinctive style of poetic diction (e.g. "yr" for "your").

The main Black Mountain poets

In addition to Olson, the poets most closely associated with Black Mountain include Larry Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Joel Oppenheimer, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams and Robert Creeley. Creeley worked as a teacher and editor of the Black Mountain Review for two years, moving to San Francisco in 1957. There, he acted as a link between the Black Mountain poets and the Beats, many of whom he had published in the review. Also, the appearance in 1960 of Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (which divides the poets included in its pages into various schools) was crucial: it established a legacy and promoted the influence of the Black Mountain poets worldwide.

Okay.

So RG took me in as an apprentice, mainly as a filmmaker in the Black Mountain approved personal style of Brakhage et al. I began to read and try to understand the poets they liked and try to learn why they hated the “Academic” poets like Donald Hall (T.S. Elliott). Wiki doesn’t have a entry for the Academics, and I never knew exactly why someone was included in one school or another. For example, Ezra Pound (despite his embarrassing anti-Semitism) was ‘good’, an early forerunner of Olson. T.S. Elliott was ‘bad’; Blake was good, probably because he was a ‘visionary’ of some kind (visionaries were good, though surrealists were bad.) Yeats was good, only sort of because he rhymed which was bad generally (this was pre-rap). The Beats and hippies including Ginsberg were ‘bad’ (though Gary Snyder snuck in as good, go figure). As far as I could understand it, good and bad had something to do with bad being personal (confessional was the worst sin) and the good, or projective verse, had something to do with line being motivated by breath and all that. It seemed to me was that the Black Mountaineers (or projectivists) thought of poetry as an investigative tool to understand humans and culture.

So, actually, they were the academics, the ones that wanted the poem to mean something, to give insight into say the history of Gloucester MA (Olson’s “thing”) and how that relates to the rest of the world. They were against overt mysticism (if assisted by drugs like the Beats) but friendly toward “bookish” mysticism that had people reading primary texts of Theosophy and the various Books of the Dead, etc.
from Olson:

“… if (the poet) is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist's act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man...I would hazard the guess that, if projective verse is practiced long enough, is driven ahead hard enough, along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans. But it can't be jumped. We are only at its beginnings.... “

Clear? Not to me either, but smart for sure!

Right in the middle of this apprenticeship, I met J who years later I married. She came with her own knapsack full of poetry. Unfortunately (for RG and for me) J was enamored of the ‘confessionals’ like Anne Sexton (and Sylvia Plath and even Gertrude Stein). Making a long story short, RG and his poet wife disapproved of J’s influence and we all went about bringing her into the apprenticeship of Black Mountain wannabes. Even the dancers that J liked were “not approved” though inexplicably Carolee Schneeman (Meat Joy, 1964, and Fuses, 1967) was a good guy, though her work was to my eye as wild as anything the unapproved Happening artists like Kaprow were up to. Nevertheless, we (J and I) struggled on to accept the teachings of RG.

Jumping ahead, I had a falling out with RG mainly because I felt he wanted people basically to follow him, and to do this you had to be an academic (preferable in anthropology or geography as English was hopeless corrupt by the “academics”) and NOT a hippie. At the time (circa 1970) I wanted more than anything else to BE a hippie and the tension resulted in RG “letting me go.” I did feel fired and it upset me. I was left with my degree in Geography, but oh well.

Now I’m getting to my poetry story. I never recovered my love of poetry. I felt that my inner software (if you will) for making and appreciating was damaged by Richard’s good guys vs bad guys. I neither rejected it completely, nor tried to “make it my own” like some of my friends did after I introduced them to it.

There is one other influence. In the late 1980’s I came once again in contact with a “movement,” this time it was the Men’s Movement whose kingpin was Robert Bly. Robert had HIS own list of good and bad. Good was “from the heart” (usually connected to indigenous cultures, antagonistic to “amerika”), often political (anti-war left of course), often international (Spanish poets and the god Rumi). Everyone in the movement adopted Robert’s love of Rumi and steered clear of his dislikes, including me. In my “small group” (the Mud Lake Men, another story) I began to write poetry (once again) and read it to the group. It was approved as I made sure it had (1) something to do with fathers, especially father-grief issues as highlighted by Bly in Iron John and/or (2) an affinity with Native American or tribal cultures. After all, we were drummers were we not?

I had another falling out (I do that a lot). This time it was because (again) I felt artistically stifled by a group who “all loved Rumi”… and who were in the process of molding their tastes to Robert’s dictats. They liked and disliked as he directed.

After my second falling out with a “movement” I steered clear of poetry. I still felt oddly anti-intellectual even “dumb” because, unlike some of my friends, I never REALLY understood Olson. J understood him better than me. Whatever my artistic skills were, they weren’t clear as they related to poetry. Robert Kelly was R’s mentor and Clayton Eshleman his friend. I avoided reading poetry in the New Yorker or literary magazines out of fear that I wouldn’t know what I liked and/or a fear that still, underneath, I was a goddam academic (or oh god confessional) poet this would show up in my taste. Friends went on to like Sharon Olds and others, but I steered clear, though not entirely unappreciative of their skills

I’m not all that “fearful” about liking the “wrong” thing in fiction (I don’t care) or in the world of graphics, painting and other fine arts. There, too, I don’t care what others think of my choices. But somehow, in poetry, I feel damaged. Poetry abuse. Or something.
So now I write poetry and dare not show anyone.
Weird, huh?

following exceprt from Wikipedia

World War II and after

After the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. John Berryman (1914–1972) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) were the leading lights in what was to become known as the confessional movement, which was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1974). Both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with modernism, but were mainly interested in exploring their own experiences as subject matter and a style that Lowell referred to as "cooked", that is consciously and carefully crafted.

In contrast, the Beat poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Gregory Corso (1930–2001), Gary Snyder (born 1930), Diane Di Prima (born 1934), Denise Levertov (1923–1997), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919), were distinctly raw. Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.

Around the same time, the Black Mountain poets, under the leadership of Charles Olson (1910–1970), were working at Black Mountain College. These poets were exploring the possibilities of open form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. The main poets involved were Robert Creeley (1926–2005), Robert Duncan (1919–1988), and Ed Dorn (1929–1999). They based their approach to poetry on Olson's 1950 essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another.

Jerome Rothenberg (born 1931) is well-known for his work in ethnopoetics, but he was also the coiner of the term "deep image". Deep image poetry is inspired by the symbolist theory of correspondences. Other poets who worked with deep image include Robert Kelly (born 1935), Diane Wakoski (born 1937) and Clayton Eshleman (born 1935).

During this time frame you also had major independent voices who defied links to well known poetic movements and forms. Robert Bly became famous for Iron John: A Book About Men and arguably a cultural phenom for liberating American men to be sensitive to their gentler selves.