A PROPOSAL FOR A COURSE THAT WAS NEVER TAUGHTJack FoleyOver thirty years ago, a friend of mine asked me to put together a proposal for a course in "modern" literature. What follows is my response. I see now that I was using Lowell and Olson as "poles" as I struggled to transform myself.The literary experiments undertaken in the modern period led to what might be called extremities of language, the attempt, through an initially disjunctive experience--which is in part responsible for the notorious "obscurity" of writers like Joyce, Eliot and Pound--to move the reader towards another and different order of understanding. In the following fragment by E.E. Cummings (#51, 95 Poems) the moon is described as hanging feebly--a blur--from thea lmo st mor ningLike all the king's horses, the reader must put the line together again: "thea lmo st mor ning" becomes "the almost morning," a time when the moon is naturally a blur because it is just about to fade. Yet the necessity of pausing over "thea" directs us towards another realm of meaning as well: the word is Greek for "goddess," and Cummings is suggesting that the moon's true stature--its divinity--lies hidden within the morning blur in the same way that the ancient Greek word lies hidden within the letters of the poet's fragmented line. Whatever Cummings' ultimate allegiance to a form of "imagism," to the embodied "image," he must first show--as William Carlos Williams put it- "how men / in their designs / have learned / to shatter" the image, must first create something akin to Eliot's "heap of broken images." Yet to mention "The Waste Land"-- a poem which was in part the product of a nervous collapse--is to suggest the psychic cost which such a "shattering" might entail. I should like to base my discussion of modernism on the writings of two poets--Robert Lowell and Charles Olson--both at times very popular with the young, both very conscious of their historical "situation." In theory at least--as Robert Duncan suggested--these two men are diametrically opposed to one another: the question of "open" versus "closed" verse. Lowell's Life Studies--the title is in part a contradiction in terms--may be described as a kind of pretense or evasion: the pretense is not only that this book will be about the "real" Robert Lowell ("In this book he rips off the mask entirely," says M.L. Rosenthal) but also, more subtly, that the book is in fact "confessional," that it is primarily concerned with psychological disclosure. Such a pretense is part of an elaborate series of strategies on Lowell's part: far from alienating the reader, Lowell attempts--by the implicit promise of providing "shocking" personal revelations, by the abundant use of slang, by the easy casualness of his verse and his situations (in the first poem the poet is "discovered" reading a newspaper)--to invite the reader in, to assure him that--however "modern"--this poetry will not be "difficult." And, indeed, the popularity of the book is a tribute to Lowell's success. Yet these devices turn out to be a means of tempering, of holding back, of "humanizing" a use of language which is far more radical than that: throughout the book there is a tendency of language to lose control, to "shatter," to assert itself against content, against the public character of the verse: there is no real point in punning on "birth" in the line, "the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth" ("Beyond the Alps") yet the pun is there; there is no real point in punning on the names of the authors to whom you dedicate poems--yet the puns are there: "must lay his heart out" (Hart Crane); "I hear you huffing" (Ford Madox Ford/Hueffer); "its bill was a black whistle" (Delmore Schwartz); "her son's a bishop") (Elizabeth Bishop). And so on. Lowell's poems do exist to reveal something, but they reveal it only at a distance, in such a way that we are only at times forced to contemplate it directly: in effect, the slang allows the poet to maintain himself at some remove from the potential chaos and violence his poems contain while, in turn, the chaos and violence give the poems their richness and power. Lowell's poetic "devices"--his puns, repetitions of words (the word "yellow," for example), phrases, concepts (though often with opposing evaluations)--become an attempt to create a context in which such words, phrases, concepts may have something of the density and freedom--the associations and lack of associations--they have in consciousness itself. Life Studies is thus a book which attempts to reveal not so much the poet's "life" as the poet's mind and, further, to reveal that mind in the mode of alienation. Against this I would set Charles Olson's Selected Writings, a book of prose and verse which attempts--at times heroically--to create what the poet calls "states of being & geography divers from the modern." Like Lowell (like everyone in the modern/post-modern period) Olson begins with the fact of alienation, of --as he might have written it--dis-tance (the title of his Grove Press collection is The Distances, of his Four Seasons collection, In Cold Hell, In Thicket) and the poetry may be conceived of as an attempt to find (create) a new "stance toward" reality, "to get man back to what he knows." Poetry thus becomes for Olson not so much a mode of "expression" as a means of access to his deepest awareness--what he calls a "stance which yields the possibility of acts" (my italics)--an attempt, as in Pound, to rouse the mind to the contemplation of its own sources. In a book like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the titles of individual entries- "A Paper," for example--are not seen (as they would be in a dictionary or in an ordinary book of "portraits") as individual "subjects" to be defined by the entry beneath them but rather--the entries frequently overlap, cross back and forth--as momentary centers of a series of verbal events, of continually changing relationships: rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition of words, etc. Similarly, a passage like the following--from Olson's famous poem, "The Kingfishers"--is, in terms of content, a moral judgment on the modern world. Yet it is also--if we attend to what Olson is always asking us to attend to, the poem's syllables ("Is it any more than / a matter of / syllables?")--an attempt to name the reality of process, of action, of continually changing events: what pudor pejorocracy affrontsPudor/pejor. Rot/pudor/pejor/neighborhood/affronts. Law/awe/crawls/below. Night-rest/neighborhood. Hood/how. It is only by placing his reader in contact with such a reality that Olson may hope to persuade him of the authenticity of his "message"-- "it isn't you which is the final but something quite different: what you do"--and one of the poet's constant themes (again there are similarities with Pound) is the overwhelming activity, the presence of what has been considered "dead": "at Yorktown the dead...are live," "at Yorktown the long dead / loosen the earth." The intentional fragmentation of the poems, the withholding of information, the "difficulties" of the verse are all reminders of the reader's distance from the real, from events which are in effect already going on, but it is the poems' peculiar promise that the very "distance" they evoke will nonetheless "be healed": "in the roar of spring, / transmutations."
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Jack Foley