Some No Doubt Mainly Personal Refections on The Collected Poems of Charles Olson

 

I’ve read a fair amount of the work of Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems (twice), the Selected Writings, which at one point in time was many people’s introduction to Olson’s work, Call Me Ishmael, some essays in the Collected Prose, but although I’ve looked through The Collected Poems of Charles Olson many times and owned it for decades, I’ve never read it cover to cover like I’m doing now (Rod Smith gave me the idea). The editor George Butterick, claims that the book that contains all Olson’s poems except Maximus, although another, later Olson book, A Nation of Nothing But Poetry, published some poems that as it turned out didn't get into the Collected.

When I first was reading what has often been called The New American Poetry, around 1986-87, first introduced to me through issues of Boundary Two (which would soon introduce me to Language Poetry as well), a journal edited by my then professor William Spanos, it seemed exciting, and very contemporary, something I needed to know RIGHT NOW.

At some point though, the New American Poetry began to seem historical to me, no longer contemporary in that it no longer seemed to be speaking quite to the present and its problems but to the American past. When I started to feel that way, I’m not sure. Maybe after I moved to Southern California and my sense of the culture I was living in had to go through some significant changes.

Just so I’m clear, I LIKE poetry that has the feel of history in it, and that belongs significantly to the past. To say that something no longer feels contemporary to me is not to say that it sucks. But it is to say that it seems to be responding to a reality that feels at a remove from contemporary reality, and that its understanding of literature and of itself speaks to a framework of a world that is gone.

The mythologizing urge of Olson in these poems, not as consistently developed as in Maximus, is fascinating, the mythologizing and psychologizing of gender especially, all the man and woman overarching archetypes (and the sexual mythologizing that would have probably been risky then but maybe seems quaint now–I realize some people might critique this more harshly) that come across as shifting and unstable.

It’s that shifting, the instability, that mark the poems not only as clearly Modernist but also as, I might venture to say, Postmodernist. The poems offer big frameworks but also seem to pull them away. They speak both within and against a world in which grand claims, grand absolutes, were probably norms of U.S. culture that are long gone now, in whatever distorted fashion they might sometimes (even often, lately) cross the U.S. contemporary political and cultural landscape.

If these poems are taking me into the past though, I feel them simultaneously defining a world which I was coming out of (in two senses: I was from there but had to leave it behind). It helps me understand how I got here, how poetry got here, in all the variety of heres that present themselves so relentlessly every day. They’re a crucial part of the American literary landscape in which my thinking and writing developed, as they were also a profound force for his own generation and the generations that more immediately followed him.

Lafcadio Hearn, Japanese Ghost Stories

 

I had a read a few of Lafacadio Hearn’s ghost stories set in Japan in various editions over the years and never quite connected with them, maybe because I was expecting something that they didn’t offer. But rereading the stories in this more complete collection, I found them to be some of the most beautiful ghost stories I’ve ever read, equally capable of being tender and moving as of inspiring a subtle but genuine sense of fright.

Hearn lived all over the world and was often notorious in his lifetime (in 1874 he married in Ohio a biracial woman who had been born into slavery, breaking the law since interracial marriage was illegal in the state) both for his behavior and outspoken attitudes, in which he frequently and openly rejected American and British racism, and for some of his newspaper writing, in which he sometimes covered some of the most sensational murders and violent crimes of the day. It was after he moved to Japan in 1890 that he wrote these stories which are now the basis of his fame. The stories are highly regarded and frequently read in Japan, while he remains a familiar name in British and U.S. supernatural fiction.

If you like your moments of fright tinged with a melancholy and sometimes tragic sense of loss, and with a historical and cultural richness that isn’t that common in the history of ghost stories, you’ll be very happy reading Japanese Ghost Stories. You’ll even forget about the silly cover quickly enough.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it!

Some Thoughts on the Essays of William Bronk

 

I’ve loved for many years the poems in William Bronk’s Collected Poems from North Point Press, and I’ve long wanted to read the companion Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays (1983). I somehow never found the right time although I’ve carried the book around for about three decades. The prose is beautiful and precise and also requires a lot of close attention, something I rarely have time for but finally found (let’s say “made”) over this last summer.

It’s really as remarkable a book as I hoped it would be, made up of three sets of essays. And worth the wait. These are essays with a long shelf life of relevance.

The book’s first set of essays, from the 1970s and collected under the subtitle “The New World,” reflects on Bronk’s travels to Palenque, Trikal, Machu Picchu, and Copan, and discusses Mayan and Incan culture and artifacts. Different cultures have created different concepts of time and space, Bronk shows in lucid detail, and those concepts change or vanish over time and can be hard to recover.

And it’s crucial to understand that they are in fact concepts, not realities. Bronk is a cultural deconstructionist (is there a better way to put that?). For humans, the so-called “realities” of the world are themselves only graspable through the concepts we have available to us, and we understand ourselves and the world from inside those concepts, but those concepts never represent any kind of metaphysical truth. They are just approaches we develop for experiencing a world that cannot be described except through cultural fictions, all of which are limited and subject to change. Bronk never says that the world doesn’t exist, since it clearly does, although in what way it does is another issue. However, all human descriptions of it are fictions, even when we tell ourselves that they are grounded in physical conditions. And our fictions not only can change, they do change.

The second set of essays in the book, “A Partial Glossary,” consists of two short pieces discussing costume and desire. And again, Bronk shows how human use and descriptions of things and ideas that we tell ourselves are fundamental reveal changing human cultural values, not ideas grounded in transcendent truth.

Whereas some writers would use the limitations Bronk recognizes as focal points for cultural comparison, or ideas about cultural relativity or intersectionality, and Bronk nods in the direction of such approaches, Bronk instead focuses mainly on the limitations of all human knowledge whatever its cultural context. We never know anything from outside our fictions of it. The world and experience of it remain unknowable. That fact brings a kind of intellectual vertigo (even reading this book can bring that on) yet also an awe that has nearly spiritual dimensions. Existence is a mystery, and while humans often hide from acknowledging that mystery, again and again we find ourselves facing it. And ultimately, disappearing into it.

The final set of essays, "The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States," is a collection of essays originally written in 1946, about 30 years earlier than the other essays in the book. This final section contains several essays each on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, all of which are fascinating, and all which show Bronk’s own developing philosophical perspective.

The essays on Thoreau made Thoreau seem, in some ways, definitively pre-modern, in that he never seems to have been quite able to imagine that the structure of a society might shape the actions of individuals irrevocably. For Thoreau, individual thought and action, whether his or that of others, were the essential components of human experience. The realities of huge interconnected human societies were ones he could see only from the perspective of an individuality that had to struggle for its independence but could do it, even if most people didn’t find it in their interest to try.

Whitman’s engagement with the concept of the oceanic, on the other hand, as Bronk explores it, points to a perspective more like that of Bronk’s of the 1970s. In the ocean, Whitman finds himself in touch with all that is larger than the human and the social, all that is unknowable and mysterious, something that one can encounter but never really understand. It’s possible, Whitman imagines, to meld with that mystery, but it’s not possible to understand it.

Melville’s paradoxes around the subject of justice form a fitting conclusion to the book. Melville understood that the law and any social contract, and human use of those things, are filled with corruption, oppression, and delusion. On the other hand, especially as he got older, Melville did not seem to have believed that there was any absolute system of truth against which those human failings could be accurately measured. Our cultural concepts of morality are all we have. Bronk shows Melville, in his short novel Billy Budd, acknowledging both that justice is often a fantasy and that humans still need a concept of it to live by, even when that concept fails them. And crucially for Melville, they need it even when they know it’s failing them.

Sentence after careful sentence, the essays in Vectors and Smoothable Curves show Bronk’s development as an essayist in something close to reverse order, with the most recently written essays coming first in the book. After all, linearity and chronology are themselves no more than fictions. Bronk shows that meaning resides in the individual, or in the culture, or both, but that ultimately it’s meaning itself that is the limitation that we have to live with and fail with, since mostly all we know are the ramifications of that limitation.

Still, awe, mystery, and the unknowable are what we also have to live with, no matter how hard we might try to avoid their presence in our lives or call on them only when we think we need them. If Bronk is not really a religious or even a spiritual writer, that’s only because the power (or the presence, or the absence, choose whatever word best fails you) he is trying to acknowledge is much larger than anything we can possibly say about it.

The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (my Goodreads review)

This book is a fun, energetic, easy read, of no huge distinction until you realize that it was published in 1908, a dozen years before Agatha Christie’s first book. What that means is that the things it seems like it might have in common with Christie’s work (a big rural house, untrustworthy servants, most people as possible suspects, etc.) are not things that Rinehart, an American author, borrowed from Christie.

Otto Penzler’s introduction identifies Rinehart as the leader of a loose school of “Had I only known!” authors. While I don’t think I’ll be following that particular lead any further, it’s interesting to note that Rinehart’s curious overuse of this foreshadowing technique was seen by others as a good way to build suspense. If Rinehart is hardly the first American woman writer of detective fiction, she seems like a big player too in the history of the cozy mystery concept. Nothing in the book is ever really shocking, no matter how often the narrator, Rachel Innes, is shocked, and the book feels entirely light and easy-going.

Miss Innes, as she is usually called by others, is not the official detective, although she certainly does plenty of sleuthing. She’s someone who wants to maintain order and happiness among her family and the others she cares about and is determined to do so. She’s curious sometimes, and sometimes not, but she’s always protective. It’s interesting to think of her amateur detective status, and that of a few other amateur women detectives, as preceding the creation of Christie’s Miss Marple.

One serious caveat about these books: the class and race attitudes, although gentle in expression, are pretty appalling not only by contemporary standards but probably even by those of the progressive political era of American history in which the books appeared. Servants are invariably silly and superstitious, and if they’re black they’re especially superstitious even if they might otherwise be portrayed as thoughtful and sensitive. There’s only one line, late in the book, that’s aggressively offensive, but the light-hearted class and race humor doesn’t fare well now, and people who want old works of pop literature to offer present-day standards should consider themselves warned.

There’s nothing great about this book, and nothing about it is remotely convincing, but it moves along at a highly energetic pace for a book more than a hundred years old, and I enjoyed it. I think the book will mostly be of interest to people who want to know more about the history of detective fiction and the history of detective fiction by and about women particularly.

This review can be found also on my Goodreads page:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4828257810