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.

Raymond Chandler and Jack Spicer

 

The similarities between these two books are remarkable. Stylistically, they both feature taut understated prose that’s remarkably precise and filled with restrained tension. Thematically, both dwell significantly and harshly on the limitations of the larger environment of writing that they’re part of: in Spicer, the failings of poetry and poetry cultures, in Chandler, the failures of the detective fiction marketplace and publishers and the limitations of the Hollywood culture of writing for films. Both books significantly (if hardly exclusively) discuss California and California writing cultures. And both are written largely during the same time period, the 40s and 50s, although Spicer continued living into the 60s. Spicer was interested in detective fiction and likely knew of Chandler’s work, but Chandler almost certainly never heard of Spicer.

Neither of these writers has huge sympathy for others or for themselves. Their harsh takes might seem cynical if not for the fact that they also often seem painfully correct. Still, both men are also at points unpleasantly misanthropic. They are both loners and alcoholics who don’t quite seem able to find stable friendships or communities. Both did have a community context and were in touch with lots of people, but the written conversations they were involved in do not always seem sustaining to them as friendship.

I’m not sure what to make of these similarities except that the cultural contexts of these two writers were not as far apart as it might seem on the surface. However, because genre remains so divisive in U.S. literary contexts, how many readers are likely to be interested in both Spicer and Chandler? The similarities between these two might be very easy never to notice.

And that last point might be emphasized by the fact that it’s to some degree accidental that I’m reading these books simultaneously. I bought the book of Spicer’s letters when it came out. Suzanne recently found the book of Chandler’s selected letters in an antique mall and thought I might be interested, and since I’m teaching a Detectives in Film and Fiction class in the spring semester, I thought I would read it before teaching the class. I had no intention of looking for similarities when I started reading both books, but the similarities are impossible (for me anyway) to ignore.

R. H. Barlow's Eyes of the God

 

R.H. Barlow co-wrote a number of stories with H.P. Lovecraft, who he first corresponded with when Barlow was 13. Lovecraft spent time with Barlow and his family in the summer of 1934, and all signs (but no certain, undeniable evidence) point to Barlow having been Lovecraft’s lover that summer, when he was 16 and Lovecraft 44. Lovecraft died three years later.

Barlow wrote not just pulp sci-fi fantasy, but also poetry and essays. For a few years he was connected to the Activist Poets, an outsider group sometimes considered, probably not quite rightly, avant garde. He moved permanently to Mexico in 1943, where he became a successful anthropologist. In 1944 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant and in 1946-48 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He eventually became head of the Department of Anthropology at Mexico City College, a position he still held when he committed suicide on January 2, 1951 at age 32.

Barlow’s fantasy-sci-fi-horror work is often unexpectedly ironic, very much unlike the determinedly unhumorous Lovecraft, and often features characters deluded and usually destroyed by their desire for power. His stories can certainly be considered early players in the field of what has become called “cosmic horror,” in which all of human experience is revealed to be empty and pointless in the face of a never-ending indifferent universe. In Barlow’s stories, both leaders and ordinary people have strange, terrible fates awaiting them. I’m finding the stories pretty entertaining, even if Barlow will never be one of the greatest figures of early pulp fantasy. There’s no shortage of fantasy weirdness (and unintentional silliness) in his work, that’s for sure.

Hippocampus Press recently released an expanded version of Barlow’s selected writing, and I list what it includes below from the details on their website.

I can recommend this work to those of you who like weirdo outsider non-formula fantasy fiction, or if you are interested in those few spots where anti-modernist fantasy writing is so far outside the norm that it nearly converges with super-modernist avant gardism. Please notice that I said “nearly.”

From the website:

https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/fiction/eyes-of-the-god-selected-writings-of-r.-h.-barlow-revised-and-expanded

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Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (2022)
Edited by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Douglas A. Anderson
596 pages!

In 2002, Hippocampus Press published Eyes of the God, a selection of R. H. Barlow’s fiction and poetry. Barlow’s ascending reputation during the past two decades, as one of the most brilliant members of the Lovecraft Circle, has necessitated this radically expanded edition, which includes many more works of fiction, among them several additions to Barlow’s intriguing “Garoth cycle” of fantasy tales. In addition, Barlow’s vibrant writings during his years in Mexico led to some striking narratives about Mexican and Native life in his adopted country.

Additional poems by Barlow have also been found, including those that display his increasing devotion to the Activist school led by Rosalie Moore, Lawrence Hart, and others.

But the most significant additions in this volume are Barlow’s two dozen essays, ranging from memoirs of Lovecraft (including his lively reports of Lovecraft’s stay at his Florida home in 1934); essays on H. G. Wells, Henry S. Whitehead, and other weird writers; his moving and insightful autobiography; and a vivid account of his witnessing a bullfight in Mexico.

All told, this definitive compilation of the totality of R. H. Barlow’s writings reveal a dynamic mind that saw both beauty and wonder in the people and environment he experienced in his short thirty-two years of life.

One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern by R. Howard Bloch

 

I had been anticipating reading One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern (2017) by R. Howard Bloch for quite awhile, but kept putting it off for reasons not worth discussing. And now I’ve finally had a chance to read it.

And my feelings? Disappointed!

Much of the book is a surprisingly tepid and cursory biography. It makes Stéphan Mallarmé and his environment feel by turns boring and pompous, maybe because the tone of this book is too often that way. There are a lot of quick and no more than semi-necessary tangents into larger historical situations that fill out the pages. The prose is often dull in its phrasing even as it tries to be dramatic. The name-dropping details are not particularly revealing regarding any of the people whose names get dropped.

I did appreciate the implication that Mallarmé, like many artists, led a relatively ordinary, often tedious life engaged with many banalities of his time, though with its fair share of illness, pain, and economic privation (though hardly more than that of many people in 19th century France). And Mallarmé’s work in women’s fashion was a fascinating element of his often difficult work life. But Bloch’s urge to make the story of Mallarmé’s daily life into the dramatic, special case of an artist often felt at odds with the ho-hum prose and facts of the narrative.

There are a few good chapters or sections of chapters. Some of the historical context of war and other upheavals of the 1870s is made fascinating, and the time right before and when Mallarmé’s famous poem “One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” is finally published (1897) has some genuine excitement. Those were for me the highlights of the book.

The close-reading chapters that follow the presentation of Mallarmé’s poem in French and a new English translation are pretty mind-numbing and overblown both, although I was surprised to learn that Mallarmé thought English, not French, was the language of the future. And the concluding chapter, which spends a lot of time quickly and boringly summarizing a lot of Modernist and even later works and says “Mallarmé came before it all!” feels in those summary paragraphs like an overwrought Wikipedia entry that isn’t very convincing. The details about his death and the tributes to him are presented with some shock and poignance, but there’s nothing especially memorable about the book’s analysis of them.

I did learn some things about Mallarmé and his poetry from this book, but on the whole it felt like a worthwhile 100-150 pages padded into nearly 300 pages. The goal of a major publishing house book like this is obviously, at least in part, to make Mallarmé’s essential Modernist poem fascinating to a larger mainstream audience. Unfortunately, I finished Bloch's One Toss of the Dice feeling that it was just as likely to turn readers away as it was to convince them that they’ve discovered the fountainhead of Modernism.

T.S. Eliot and What The Thunder Said

 

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

Jed Rasula (University of Princeton Press: 2022)

This is not a formal review, just a response.

The center of the broad range of events and people in this book is 1922, the year of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, although it covers history from decades earlier and goes forward to decades later. I wanted to read it in 2022 although it came out late in the year. I succeeded, finishing on New Year’s Eve.

Anyone who wants to know how The Waste Land became such an essential poem in English (defining what Modernist poetry in that language was broadly considered to be) and beyond should certainly read What the Thunder Said. The book explains a lot about how and why the poem became what it became, and what and who it changed. The reaction it caused, the effect on critics and writers, the elements of media sensation of the time, those are all here. I appreciated the way the book brought the Modernist 20s alive again even after all that has been written about them.

Oddly maybe, one of the most interesting things to me was how often the book moved away from Eliot and The Waste Land, which taken together are not the subject of even half the book’s pages. That’s not the fault of Rasula as scholar (he is impressively informed) or an error; he wants to put the poem in a larger context to help readers understand why it felt so new at the time. He starts with Richard Wagner and and Nietzsche and reaches forward to 1971, the year that The Waste Land manuscripts were published.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the shortage of pages on Eliot and his poem results partly from the fact that there’s not as much to say about them as there was for many decades. Eliot and The Waste Land have received about all the coverage and literary analysis they need. Although recent revelations about Eliot’s long-running connection with Emily Hale (revelations that seem like they appeared after most of Rasula’s book was already written) are going to lead to some new criticism about Eliot’s motivations and sources, and (given our own time and place) probably some criticisms of his character, there’s really not much more to be said about the place of Eliot and his poem in English-language poetry.

Rasula mentions the issue briefly, but my sense is that the centrality of Eliot’s poem began being displaced even in his lifetime, at least and especially in the U.S. Eliot did not end up a hero for the Beats or for the New American poetry or for the counterculture that both helped usher in. By the 1960s Howl was rivaling and had maybe surpassed The Waste Land as the most famous 20th century American poem (and book of poetry), although Rasula calls Howl in “hindsight… clearly an idiomatic update on Eliot’s vision” and not the rebuke to Eliot that it was sometimes taken to be (Rasula 281).

Eliot’s story as poet and as a person with feelings, the crisis of soul that prompted the poem and resulted in Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and his story as a dominant poet-critic for the next 40 years, is hardly a triumph of the radical new, however much the poem originally brought that with it. It’s not even especially inspiring or tragic; it feels kind of sodden and restrained, a bit of a tightly wrapped bring down, like Eliot himself could be. What the Thunder Said also tells the story of Eliot the poet as carefully crafted institution, guarded by institutional rules and regulations that he significantly controlled. As I can imagine Patrik Ourednik saying, “And that too was modern.” By late in his life, Eliot and his poem were already beginning to seem too wedded to the past, more a guarded monument and less a harbinger of the future. I guess that means that the height of The Waste Land's prominence was really about 40 years, although it obviously continues to hang on in university curricula that still have a place for Modernism or Modernist poetry.

For myself, I appreciated most the cultural and historical contextualizing of Rasula’s book. The thumbnail sketches of various writers and their publications that the book sometimes races through were more or less interesting to me depending on how often I had heard those writers’ stories before. But why, and how, and for whom the poem became so central made for me a fascinating historical study. It made me want to pick up and read Eliot’s work again. Almost.

Maybe though, like Rasula seems to be showing but not quite saying, The Waste Land just isn’t as interesting as it used to be, especially for those of us who have read it many times and moved on.

Rasula’s book helped fill in what I didn’t know about how The Waste Land became so crucial in 20th century English language writing, and even beyond English. But it didn’t (nor was it trying to) make a case that there’s any more to the poem than people already understand. Speaking for myself, What The Thunder Said left me feeling that I’m unlikely to return to Eliot as more than a writer of historical significance whose life and work now belong definitively to the past.

The Waste Land shocked and changed people in its own time. It’s great to know why, and knowing that knocked some of the dust off and brought the poem alive again for me for a moment. But its original magic feels now, at least to me, like it’s still floating back in the post-World War I waste land that, to its credit, and in some ways even against Eliot’s understood intentions, it pushed American and European culture to move beyond.