One of my favorite poems in Kyle Dargan’s collection Anagnorisis (2018, Northwestern) is a long-ish piece with a quasi-documentary title, “In 2016, The African-American Poet Kyle Dargan Is Asked To Consider Writing More Like The African-American Poet Ross Gay.” It is addressed to “Friends,” perhaps a public assembly, who apparently have suggested that Dargan join Gay in the expression of gratitude for the modest comforts and pleasures of what many of us used to call “ordinary living.” But Dargan responds:
My daybreak
inclination is to rise
with my mandible
locked by a functional
disillusionment
with our country –
a means of signifying
that requires no grace
be said before it devours
this buffet of civic failings.
Dargan’s “In 2016” is a complex, contentious and restless poem that includes self-chastisement, self-pity, disgust, praise, resentment, reflection, accusation and desire. It is a poem about racism – how could it not be when every morning its voice must contend with its own clenched jaw? Dargan forcefully establishes his position and attitude about social issues in the public square – and like every persuasive address, the speech is based on a particular rhetorical stance to get its point across. He is speaking to those who have the blinkered nerve to tell him what he should sound like, and when and how his joy should be made manifest. Thus, what he chooses to sound like here is not just the poem’s conveyance but also its cargo.
The choices a BIPOC poet makes about language and sound is one of Jaswinder Bolina’s main concerns in Of Color, his collection of nine essays. In “Writing Like a White Guy,” he relates a remark made to him by “an older white poet” during his first year as an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan: “’With a name like Jaswinder Bolina, you could publish plenty of poems right now if you wrote about the first-generation, minority stuff. What I admire is that you don’t write that kind of poetry.’” That leaves the young poet asking: “Will I be a writer or a minority writer? If I’m the former, adopting the English I’m taught in prep school, in college, in graduate school, I’m using a language assigned to somebody else while downplaying the issue of race. If I’m the latter, making race a central theme in my work, I risk alienating white readers or forcing myself into a niche where I can be disregarded as a novelty. I’m not making literature: I’m making ethnic literature … To the poet, though, the first question isn’t one of class or color. The first question is one of language.”
The white writer, traditionally not compelled to address issues of race, professes “to speak from a blank slate. It’s the position of no position, the voice from nowhere or from everywhere, and in this it is Godlike.” But when Bolina encounters someone at one of his readings who, with supposedly kind intent, says to him, “You’re so Americanized, what nationality are you?” he responds courteously so that the one querying “doesn’t hear the tiredness in my reply.”
Bolina’s essays don’t betray that weariness, but one may hear forbearance, tolerance – and from his tone I conclude that he believes we have the potential for broader understanding. The essays comprise responses, long articulated by Bolina (or so I imagine), that seem to have required concision and patience as well as some reconsideration on his part. As a result, these companionable essays squeeze one’s arm with the firm, fraternal pressure of a trustworthy adviser.
The arm he squeezes, often that of another poet, includes a hand that probably never has taken up race as a topic. “Firsthand experience of racism is the kind of thing a poet probably ought to write about,” he says. “But the first time I wrote a poem about it, a white poet lamented that I was merely outing the obvious, only reiterating something he, I, and many readers of poetry already knew was wrong.” The presumption of bland sententiousness in poems on race is something I’ve heard many times – though Bolina speaks up for those poems by saying in “Color Coded,” “What the white poet missed is that the observation of racial injustice it itself new, that it hasn’t existed in poetry for very long or been explored to anything approaching completion.” That’s certainly true. But also, there is plenty of dull didacticism to go around everywhere – as well as a vast compost of self-crediting lineated memoir that gropes for tropes. But these aren’t craft essays — and Bolina keeps his focus on the resistance of white readers (and writers) to see what is actually happening on the page – and on their claim that “any emphasis on race will only diminish its universality.”
In “The Writing Class,” Bolina considers the MFA-industrial complex and reflects on his early desires to attend grad school, having “believed my dream of a life in poetry to be pure, uncontaminated by socioeconomics.” He sees that “those of us who are able to attend grad school can do so only as beneficiaries of structural advantages … literature is an art, which means it should at least attempt to represent the society in which it’s produced. It can’t fully do that if its primary mode and conditions of production exclude most of the population.” This leads him toward a critique of the poetry conference/reading series network “where thousands of nattily dressed writers convene to network, present, and perform in the hotel ballrooms of America’s priciest urban centers, sleeping four to a room and putting ten-dollar drinks in the lobby bar on already overburdened credit cards.” Well, poetry – being a poet – is a calling, not a profession. If, as Bolina asserts, “The practice of poetry should be utterly antithetical to any kind of linguistic restriction,” then maybe one should skip AWP (rather than disparage such an easy target) and give up “networking” one’s verse into the swirl of creative sameness. But of course, that’s not Bolina’s point. He is reminding us that “our writing creates its own economy. And when the consumers of poetry are almost exclusively also those who produce it, we are left ascribing value to our own product.”
Of Color also finds Bolina, the son of Sikh Punjabi “middle-class”parents who emigrated to the Chicago from northern India via England, recalling personal moments that inform his orientation to the art and the world portrayed within it. These memories led me back to one of his poems, “Love Song of the Assimilated,” which includes these lines:
… If anybody asks, Where’s he really from? Meaning the Rangoon
Nebula, meaning the seventh moon of Guadalajara or the ice planet
Karachi, tell him I come in peace or I pledge allegiance.
[Published by McSweeney’s on June 20, 2020, 134 pages, $18.00 hardcover]
* * * * * *
In an email to Rod Smith dated July 17, 2003, Robert Creeley (1926-2005) expressed some rudimentary ideas about a potential selected edition of his correspondence, stored at Stanford University. He wrote, “Thinking of the Selected Letters, it would seem some general ‘map’ or sense of focus or parameter would be the first need. The book will certainly ‘tell a story,’ perhaps the most useful that can be told … Here’s a link from Stanford which lists the names of correspondents …” That “list” of names runs to over 100 pages. Ultimately, Smith, along with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, produced The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley and published it in 2004. Sixteen years later, it is finally available in paperback.
The collection does “tell a story” as Creeley had envisioned. But to shape it, the editors sorted through and evaluated over 15,000 letters, cards, faxes and emails. They also considered the previous collections – such as the ten-volume Black Sparrow Press edition of the Creeley-Olson correspondence. That series, which included over 1000 letters (three-fourths of which were written by Creeley) spanned only the period of April 1950 to July, 1952, the years when Creeley most intensely articulated the principles of projective verse and field poetics. Many of these letters stand out in The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley – though in the early 50’s, Creeley was writing to many people, including Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman, to whom he wrote in 1951:
“Take it this way, or break it down, so: one can have (among the variety, larger) at least 2 kinds of ‘essence’ for any thing, coming to exist in his writing (& here, of course, it is poetry we are thinking of) — & by essence, I mean those solids, which come to make substance for the given poem, etc. Simply, materials & the presence given to them, in the work. So, then: (for our use) 2 kinds. And the first, let’s make it: of the instant, having no ‘history’ beyond the given context, no attachment to an external set of actions or premises (& it should be made clear, this is not to confine the possible associations, but rather to make clear, emphases) which the reader might be given, in another instance, by either implication, or overt reference … That is, here, in this instance, the emphases all fall to the immediate, to that instant, of coherence, of the thing, just here, just in this one context, being: NOW.”
In 1953, while living in Majorca and just before moving to Asheville, North Carolina to teach at Black Mountain College, Creeley published two small collections of poems, The Kind of Act Of and The Immoral Proposition. The following year, he published The Gold Diggers and Other Stories. In both the early poetry and prose fiction, he was puzzling out the principles that would inform his six decades of work. His letters of the late 1940’s and early 50’s show him absorbing Proust, Heidegger, Sartre, Jung, Lawrence, Graves – and in the process, working out an appropriate “presence” to inhabit his texts.
In the introduction to The Gold Diggers, he wrote, “If you once say something, it will lead you to say more than you had meant to,” a most curious statement for a young sentence-stringer. (“If you once say something” is already charmingly Creeleyesque.) This cautious diffidence about expression is echoed in “The Immoral Proposition”:
If you never do anything for anyone else
you are spared the tragedy of human relation-
ships. If quietly and like another time
there is the passage of an unexpected thing:
to look at it is more
than it was. God knows
nothing is competent nothing is
all there is. The unsure
egoist is not
good for himself.
The implied question here is: what kind of poem does something for someone else without resorting to a heroic, self-crediting gesture of its own? If you once say something, your desire to sound impressive may overtake the work. Since being unsure was Creeley’s métier (unsure of pleasing the loved one is a recursive, self-conscious gesture in For Love [1962]), his task was to restrain the egoist. But there was no standard technique for achieving this quasi-purity. In the letters, exuberance tipping into graphomania, he talked himself into a calling, a purpose.
In 1950 at the age of 24, he began a correspondence with William Carlos Williams, then 67. Charles Simic once said that Creeley’s poetry “doesn’t gossip, doesn’t confess secrets, doesn’t have a rich imaginative life, doesn’t write about nature or cities, and has nothing to say about history” … but Creeley’s letters include all these facets of behavior. This points to the severity of Creeley’s ethos as poet, of how much he would not allow. To Williams, he wrote that his mother had attended the Doctor’s reading at Brandeis; he then admitted that he and his mother “couldn’t get on the same place” regarding his work as a poet and teacher, and she would say, “I like to think Bob could work, if he had to.”
At times Creeley’s contentiousness erupted in his letters. In 1954 while editing The Black Mountain Review, Creeley published Martin Seymour- Smith’s dismissive review of Roethke’s The Waking (“No amount of metrical jellying alone can turn what was first a prose idea into a poem”). This triggered correspondence between Creeley and Kenneth Rexroth, a member of the magazine’s board of contributing editors. Rexroth resigned, and an unrepentant Creeley penned a few pages of self-justification. At the same time, Robert Duncan wrote to complain about Creeley’s review of Kenneth Patchen’s book, causing Creeley to exclaim about Patchen, “Here is a man who has profited by every fucking filthiness of literary practice in the US today and Duncan says, ‘cruel …’ is this man serious? Is he going to lay [sic] down and lick the fucking stick that’s shoved up his ass? … This is the end of the world, possibly – and yet we are to have these politenesses.”
Beyond the reiteration of his theories, Creeley had much else to write about to his friends and relatives. In an early letter to his mother during his time as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service, he wrote, “’I’ve sent you a package containing the artificial eye which I got in Calcutta. It was cracked a few days ago mysteriously. Rather annoying, since I had it in a tin packed in cotton. Anyhow, see if you can get me another of similar measurements.” And as for gossip, there’s plenty. In 1980, he writes to Robert Duncan, “I just heard from Boston University that Mark Strand (!) got the goddamn job the day after his charming visit. Whereas three weeks after our time there, committee still hadn’t met to talk it over. So – what did I really expect, I wonder. I know that snobbish disposition never quits – even in the wistful heads of initial poor girls like Helen Vendler. And clearly I wasn’t going to get around her sad dumbness – viz. that Louise Glück, Charles Wright, Dave Smith et al mean that ‘American poetry is in good hands’ …”
Ezra Pound, Cid Corman, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Jerome Rothenberg, Rosemarie Waldrop, LeRoi Jones, George Oppen, Diane Di Prima, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein … the story told by these exchanges is the history of a significant part of post-World War II American poetry. As Creeley aged, the letters may have become shorter and often dealt with the details of moving around – but they continue to probe. To Peter Gizzi and Elizabeth Willis, he wrote in 1990, “This year going by has really been one I’ve had to recognize I could not keep doing scenes like that biz in England, nor could I manage all the usual mail or demand as I had. It’s literally age – not a tottering, or failure, just increasing inability to run up hills, stay up talking all night, or hear clearly in a crowded restaurant.”
[Published by the University of California Press on March 3, 2020, 512 pages, $29.95 paperback]
* * * * *
On a trip to Lisbon in 2017, I made a pilgrimage to the house of Fernando Pessoa at Rua Coelho de Rocha 16-18, now maintained as a museum. A lively conversation with a guide led to her unsolicited offer – you may touch his typewriter if you wish. I placed the tip of my forefinger on the letter “I” which begins one of his sentences in The Book of Disquiet: “I am the space between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life makes of me.”
Peddling virtues, plenty of poets are telling me what they are and what they will and won’t accept. The absence of nuance dispirits me. But often I prefer Pessoa’s diffidence and uncertainty – it offers a generous space for imagining the world and oneself rather than merely describing and asserting.
In the space between what he was and what he wasn’t, Pessoa created several personae and heterónimos – six different names and poetic idioms, each poet a discrete identity. Even Pessoa’s own name implies these distributed selves, since “Pessoa” is derived from the Latin word meaning a character in a play or a mask, and which in modern Portuguese simply denotes “a person” in the most general sense of the word. Perhaps Pessoa’s poems under the name Alvaro de Campos have attracted the most attention – though that poet’s master, in Pessoa’s historiography, was Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa specified his date of birth as April 16, 1889 and his death in 1915 of tuberculosis. Caeiro was a late bloomer as a poet, composing his initial verses in 1914.
Caeiro was described by Pessoa as “a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind” – and unlike Pessoa’s more metropolitan characters, Caeiro wrote a more plainspoken Portuguese. The Caeiro poems completed and collected as The Keeper of Sheep in 1914. “To find one’s personality by losing it – faith itself subscribes to that sense of destiny,” wrote Pessoa. While cultivating his personae, Pessoa worked as a freelance translator of business texts and correspondence – he had spent his childhood in South Africa and was fluent in English. At the age of six, he wrote letters under the name Chevalier de Pas.
Pessoa also prepared a Caeiro manuscript titled The Shepherd in Love which may have been intended as a pamphlet. His new editors, Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, have now included it in The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro along with The Keeper of Sheep and Uncollected Poems, fluidly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Ferrari.
From The Keeper of Sheep:
16
If only my life were an ox cart
Which, early in the morning, comes creaking down the road,
And later goes back where it came from
Almost as the gentle dusk is falling on that same road.
I would have no need of hopes – I’d need only wheels …
My old age would have neither wrinkles nor white hair …
When I was no use any more, they would simply take off my wheels
And I would lie upturned and broken at the bottom of some ravine.
Or else they would make something different of me
And I would know nothing about it …
But I am not an ox cart, I am different,
But just how I am different no one would ever tell me.
Pessoa was an avid translator of Walt Whitman’s poetry – and the editors note in their introduction that “Whitman was a key influence in the invention of Caeiro.” Just as Whitman had introduced himself to the American public through “anonymous notices” – “An American bard at last!” – so Pessoa may have planned to introduce Caeiro the same way.
Pessoa kept working on the 49-page sequence of The Keeper of Sheep until 1935, the year he died. “I don’t want any more from life than to feel its loss in these unforeseen afternoons,” wrote Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet. This, of course, is to want a lot – a whole world, gone elsewhere. Caeiro seems less melancholy and he comes across as a rustic character who finds correspondences in the world while tending his herd:
From my village I see as much of the earth as can be seen from the universe …
That’s why my village is as large as any other bit of the earth,
Because I am the size of what I see
And not just the size of my own height …
[Published by New Directions on July 28, 2020, 288 pages, $18.95 paperback]