Some was curious indeed -- as 'translating' parts of James Joyce's great collection of stories, Dubliners , into Basic English. Much was classically solid -- the language study, for example, Latin and German -- and much simply the useful acquisition of a basic ability to read and write, to make clear, in William Carlos Williams' phrase, "what subsequently I saw and what heard.
Despite I could hardly know it starting out, writing was to prove the one constant in a life marked with endless shiftings of place and relationship. I married at By 28 I was single again but then remarried within a year.
Then separated again 20 years later, then married again, and so continue to be. Is that an American habit, I wonder? A few years ago Buckminster Fuller pointed out that a number of Americans representing one-fifth of the country's population leave home each year. What else might we say of ourselves? That we think we need know no language but English although in obvious fact we know many -- more languages are being spoken in New York at this moment than anywhere else on earth!
Is it an embarrassment to be discovered liking such things or having such skills? That catch phrase, "a good read," comes with the same inference as "a fun place" or "have a nice day. Robert Graves wrote that poetry is that art for which no academy exists, meaning, as I understood him, that there is no place one can go, so as to learn whatever the practice of poetry might be.
But Graves had a tradition of some real kind for his own instruction and support. How different that "half-savage country, out of date," which Ezra Pound was born into and which, it would seem, many American poets as myself still choose as our condition, fearful that the far more secure model of English verse might displace altogether the small imaginal place we can call home.
My generation was for years divided between those who followed T. Eliot's instance and so looked to a classically developed poetry in the English tradition and those as myself who doggedly followed Dr. When he was asked where it was he had got his "diction," he answered curtly, "Out of the mouths of Polish mothers. To gain an admission and use for that source of our ways of speaking, our various rhetorics, was a long and often displacing battle.
We didn't talk right, as one says, we were vulgar. So we were the "raw" in contrast to the "cooked" in Levi-Strauss' formula, and that was entirely our pleasure. America, whatever it is, cannot be taken to be a single place. Yet I know I stay fixed in New England in my own mind as much as if I had spent my whole life there, perhaps even more so than one who has.
It is my imago mundi , that picture of world I carry with me as its imagination. Almost doggedly as I have moved from the east to the west, north to south, traveling at times two to three thousand miles in each direction several times a year, I have still stayed "home," in my mind at least, still thought it must be snowing now in Boston or how pleasant it must be in Maine with the fall leaves turning color.
That's where I was, however changed it seemed all was around me. What otherwise might matter is still much as Whitman had it, that the country needs to embrace its poets. Poets are so very low in the ranking of public performers or those providing the body politic with material of their interest and desire.
If the sad events of September 11, , provoked a remarkable use of poems as a means wherewith to find a common and heartfelt ground for sorrow, it passed quickly as the country regained its equilibrium, turned to the conduct of an aggressive war, and, one has to recognize, went back to making money. Is poetry of such little consequence in this country because it does not "make money," can be hardly called a "profession" or even a sensible "vocation," seems most aptly undertaken by adolescents and older, emotional women?
Does poetry "tell" us anything of any relevance? What does it mean? All those questions have clear and very simple answers -- but they will not be found here. He looks for a new, and tacitly social, articulation of American space in an extremely impacted version of poetic form.
It is as if the cohesive linguistic environments that conventional social practices rely on cannot be admitted. The poem seems to be reconciled to the forward, downward movement of words on the page but at the same time to be resisting spatial or temporal location. Yet there is an undeniable moment of temporal arrest, as if the fixing of words on the page fixes a moment.
Ellipsis, compression, syntactical uncertainty, and the insistent breaking of the line make hesitancy and undecidability integral to the overall effect of the poetry. The poems become the receptacle of a kind of volatile potential for meaning that is repeatedly constrained by self-silencing gestures that reject the totalising ambitions of the complete and unequivocal statement.
The shocks administered to the drive towards syntactical and semantic completion by linebreaks and stanza breaks lead to a reconfiguration of Poundian energy. The complicated parsing of emotional states that resist sequential narration led Creeley into a position in which the dyadic encounter implied by lyric tradition became an analogue for the social bond.
Situating himself through a highly singular interpretation of the emerging tradition of Poundian modernism, Creeley seeks to query this bond. Social being is examined as a space of dynamic, provisional communicative exchange that refuses any legislative force. It is relation per se that is tested in this writing, rather than the disintegration of a particular relationship.
Fredman and S. George F. Butterick and Richard Blevins, 10 vol. Meyerowitz, London: Penguin, , Although Objectivism is notoriously hard to define in a way that embraces the work of all these poets, and related others such as Williams or Basil Bunting, the writing associated with it typically aspires to clarity, directness and sincerity in the depiction of its objects, and the poem itself is sometimes viewed as an object.
However, I will be hesitant to make positive claims about their impact. Another part of the Williams poem provides the epigraph to Words. See, e. Site map — Syndication. Privacy Policy — About Cookies. Skip to navigation — Site map.
Caliban French Journal of English Studies. Contents - Previous document - Next document. Full text PDF k Send by e-mail. It is striking, in this regard, tha Notes 1 See Perloff for a survey of hostile reactions to short form in Creeley. Top of page. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine.
Poems Find and share the perfect poems. America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here , you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us , and nowhere but you to be. Age Most explicit— the sense of trap as a narrowing cone one's got stuck into and any movement forward simply wedges once more— but where or quite when, even with whom, since now there is no one quite with you—Quite?
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