The question of my relation to the New Americans over the long decades since the ’70s has recently come up. In working through my last post, a response to a review that framed my 2016 book with a retelling of the poetic debacle of 1978, I linked to an essay I published in 2000 (per copyright date; it likely appeared in 2001) that was, at the time, my critical and historical assessment of some of its major figures: Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Duncan (1988) and Dorn (1999) had already passed, and I do not think I sent the essay to Creeley, with whom I maintained good relations at the time (Creeley died in 2005). Creeley tended to glaze when I sent him offprints of my critical writing, for instance the essay on “poetic vocabulary” that links Jackson Mac Low and BASIC English, to which he wrote a one-word response: “Impressive.” Only later did I find, via a comment Creeley dropped in conversation and a letter in his Selected Letters, that BASIC English had been an influence on his work, after a high school teacher asked to write an essay using its minimal vocabulary.
The events of September 2001 decisively changed the focus of thinking through the poetics of the New Americans onto a more immediate political situation; the broad expanses of time needed for genial conversation on poetry and poetics would be displaced by a militarized discourse of threat, reprisal, and nonexistent WMDs. The essay itself was a kind of swerve, using a request from editor Timothy Murphy for a contribution for a volume of the academic journal Genre to be titled “Desert Island Texts,” with a prompt something like, “what one book would you want to have if stranded on a desert island.” Usually this is a call to think on that which is truly great: The Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, even The Making of Americans. I chose a text I felt ambivalent about, in the full range of affects associated with bad history, guilt, father figures, star-crossed youth: Sherman Paul, Emersonian endowed professor of American literature at Iowa who was eager to enlist poetry students who wanted to distance themselves from the Writers Workshop and its paint-by-numbers approach to poetry. After a memorable “action studies seminar” I organized from 1971–72 on the American long poem, Paul went on to write one of the first full-length studies of Olson: Olson’s Push. He then followed it with a three-author study, The Lost America of Love, using unorthodox methods of autobiographical critical reflection inspired by his poets, which in themselves I found difficult to take.
I link the essay here and hope to make it the keystone of a collection tentatively to be titled My New Americans. It is an essay that not many have seen, and I offer it as well as my rebuttal to questions of method and scholarship that were just raised. In my footnote to the essay, I wrote:
After the shipwreck, I managed to salvage only two texts from my extensive library—Sherman Paul’s The Lost America of Love and my own Bad History, which I had in any case more or less committed to memory. The Lost America of Love was a book I initially did not like when it was published, but there is nothing like free time on a desert island to reevaluate one’s responses. And of course, many memories of my personal association with Paul at the University of Iowa in the early 1970s came back to me on rereading his work. So, with nothing else to do, I wrote the following essay, which eventually led to Jeanne Heuving’s invitation to present it at the University of Washington, in her lecture series on the poetics of “love,” in May 2000. By then I was already off the island. . . but I kept with me the thoughts of a Lost America that occupied my time while there. (279)
The essay has three parts and coda: sections on Creeley, Dorn, and Duncan, followed by a reading of the concept of “love” in my then-recent Bad History. In the essay, I read Sherman Paul reading his authors, and read him in turn—so it is an essay on reception, particularly of the immanent concepts of personhood and authorship being put forward by the New Americans, which I read in turn as mythifying and ideological. The Creeley section argues against any positivity of the concept of “love,” particularly in the “psychical fantasy of woman” that is foundational for his poetry.
Behind these figures of Woman as pathetic, hysterical, and unselfconscious is the originary fantasy of the destructive Goddess. In two essays included in A Quick Graph, one on Swinburne and one titled “In Her Service Is Perfect Freedom,” Creeley cites with fascination and horror the “White Goddess,” Robert Graves’s (now totally cliched) portrait of the destructive energies of Laura Riding. If the Goddess is, for Paul, a convention by which the crisis of gender may be contained, she is for Creeley, naturally, the moment of encounter itself: “The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips as red as rowan-berries. . . . She will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag.” In the essay on Swinburne, Creeley associates this figure with a moment of erotic destruction at the heart of Swinburne’s “algolagnia—the association of sexual fulfillment with pain”; in his poetry, a Lacanian “psychical fantasy of woman” connects the apotheosis and denigration of Woman as the site for the poet’s destruction and reconstitution.
This is very much a criticism informed by Lacan and Žižek, in the decade after the publication of the latter’s Sublime Object of Ideology. There is a dual focus on the category of the “subject” and the ideological which I am trying to solve; the crisis of 9/11 would render that simple connection problematic, as the destruction offered really could not be identified with psychic fantasy (although Žižek would attempt it, as we know). The reading of Dorn, in fact, focused on what seemed and still seems to me a failed attempt at a poetics of political irony as counter to “lost America”:
In their logic of paradox, Dorn’s trivial pursuits [his later, ironic, haiku-like poems] start to slip from historical necessity that locates them, precisely because they can only focus their distancing irony on themselves. It is here that only a total recuperation, not simply a reserved judgment, by the critic may save them . . . . In textbook example of what I will call the “elliptical fallacy,” Dorn’s poetry of ironized perpetual crisis demands a wider horizon of historical context in order for its negation to signify. In its totalizing recuperation by criticism, however, it is precisely this historical context that is replaced, leaving Dorn holding the bag filled with meaningless rubble. Dorn enacts a Law of Diminishing Returns, attempting simultaneously to preserve and destroy the historical horizon that gives his negative introjects their meaning and necessity, as in: “Alaska / is the Raquel Welch / of landscape” (YL, 79). (304)
That is criticism as it used to be practiced, and I had done my homework and wanted to show what I learned. We cannot do that any more; there is not enough time; the results are predetermined; and what counts is not some pie-in-the-sky reconciliation of the texts we read with the methods we bring to them, but the hierarchical position taking that advances us into discourse (I am being Dornian here). For Duncan, my focus was on the necessity of such a reading practice, to elucidate the destruction at the basis of poetry that makes it necessarily historical, and which I follow:
In 1968, when I first encountered Duncan’s war poetry, I was in the last year of my student deferment at Berkeley and would soon be eligible for the draft. While the rhetorical violence of Duncan’s poetry resonated profoundly with the collective state of mind of the culture I was in, it was in no sense possible to sublate its relation to the object—the body of the male conscript or dead Asian—into poetry’s production of cosmic, life-affirming desire. I possessed such a body that might be consumed, or might consume another’s. The war for me was not primarily a spiritual crisis, a Blakean contest between the emanations of America and Asia. Such a sublation, however, is exactly what is performed in Paul’s reading of Duncan, leading to speculation about the nature (and gender) of the abject in postmodern poetry. (307–8)
This is very much a psychohistorical reading, and as a reading it follows, as it works through, both Duncan and Paul. The figure of the sacrifice, which the event of 1978 evokes, is also at stake; here, the necessary violence of myth is instantiated. But my larger concern is Paul’s misrecognition of this violence, his sublation of it into the idealized fields of the literary. This is the violence that must be attacked ideologically. Let’s hope that project may continue, and extend to the forms of rationalization and denial that guide the normalization of violence at the present time.
I end my discussion with a section of Bad History—and really, that is what this is all about: how to end bad history. Have we done so yet? Are we so far from seeing it that it has become impossible?
