In Berkeley, San Francisco & the Bay Area, during the 1960s, there was a sudden proliferation of little magazines, many of which started taking shots at each other, & this sharpshooting quickly blossomed into a 'little magazine war' only slightly less spirited than the pamphlet controversies of the 18th century. It seemed like every poet in town had access to a mimeo-graph machine, & was using it to crank out his own little magazine, filling it with his own & his friends' poems & criticism, & either invidiously or good-naturedly putting down his 'rivals.' There were magazines titled with letters of the alphabet & magazines with titles like "Open Space," "Rivoli Review," & "The Capitalist Bloodsucker." Titles which were immediately satirized to "Open Sore" & "Ravioli Review," But while the sniping was a local phenomenon, the mimeograph magazine boom was far from that: LeRoi Jones & Dianne Di Prima had been publishing "The Floating Bear" for years from New York, where Ed Sanders was spewing out his classic "Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts." There were mimeo magazines coming out of Pocatello, Albuquerque, Vancouver, & Toronto, to name only a few unlikely places.

Of course there was a lot of cliquishness & schlock in these journals, but there was also a good deal of exciting writing. James Koller & Joanne Kyger were first published in those blurry pages; Joe Dunn turned out a whole series of "White Rabbit" booklets of poetry— on an offset machine in the Greyhound Bus Co.'s printing department; Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, & Robert Duncan appeared in "Open Space," where the only good James Dickey poem I've ever seen was pirated; Denise Levertov contributed an excellent poem to Rick Duerden's "Rivoli Review"; James Herndon (The Way It Spozed To Be) had an unforgettable 'review' of a Giants-Dodgers game in "J."

But more important than the quality of their contents was the fact of these magazines' abundance & speed. Having them, we could see what we were doing, as it came, hot off the griddle. We could get instant response to what we'd written last week, & we could respond instantly to what the guy across town or across the country had written last month. Further, many poets who didn't stand a Christian's chance against the lions of 'proper' publication in university quarterlies or 'big-time' magazines could get exposure &, more importantly, encouragement &/or criticism. For all its excesses it was a healthy condition.

Those dancing days are largely gone now: there seem to be fewer little mags in operation now, & the ones I've seen recently seem to lack the zip the old ones had. This may be more symptomatic of my own aging than of an actual drop in quality, but that's the way it looks to me. But whatever the situation presently, the energy of those middecade mimeographers has borne fruit, if only in the fact that almost all the poets I want to talk about here had early work published in those 'fugitive' (un)periodicals. (There's more to it than that, of course: a community of poets was established which, while it held together, was a valuable, nourishing culture.)

But even tho 'big-time' publishing in America has loosened up—the mass media have become almost scarily efficient, quickened their reflexes, & will now print virtually unknown poets—don't think you'll be able to get any accurate sense of the directions right-now American literature is taking by simply reading the "New York Review of Books" or "Evergreen Review." For that you will also have to search out the little magazines & the small, even the mimeograph, publishers.

Jack Collom is a case in point—one of the most exciting young poets around, & almost totally unknown outside the mimeograph subculture. His concern with language is everywhere evident in his first collection, Wet [1]l He writes three distinct kinds of poems: a more or less conventional poem, of which "Brag" is a good, fun example, in which he brags of having the "second best left-handed set shot in Middle Park," but also of having seen "a small leaf level with my chest." Then he writes poems with rather more tangled syntax, in which he gives us scenes of a domestic life with humor, affection & tenderness, but without sentimentality. In these, his language allows him to shift location & point of view quickly & sharply, as in "Stole." A somewhat longer one of these poems deals with Se-Quo-Yah, the Cherokee who invented an alphabet with which to record his tribe's language, & was almost persecuted to death for his 'black magic.' Finally, he's done some striking linguistic experiments, which I'm not sure I can call poems, but which are certainly some of the most interesting things like them I think I've ever seen. Some of these work with single words in sequences or chains, as this section from the middle of an untitled page:

   lion		boy		baby		bug		sky,

   eat		beat		bite		hypnotize	eat

   boy		baby		but		tiger		sun
	

Others set up streams of words that run across & into each other from various points on the page. Others play with parts of words, not to make cute puns, but to investigate the possibilities of the words themselves, as by plugging prefixes onto words that don't ordinarily take them, e.g., "rebird." Again, these experiments don't give me what I want & need from poems, but they are not 'concrete' or tricky. They have an integrity that's extremely attractive, & I think that Collom has gained from writing them, as other poets might, from reading them.

Two 'big' publishing houses with nation-wide distribution have recently begun series devoted to first books by young poets. The first Frank O'Hara Award from Columbia University Press ("intended to encourage the writing of experimental poetry and to aid in its publication") was earned by Joseph Ceravolo with a very fine book, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts. [2] If Ceravolo's poems seem difficult at first, it may be because he often unexpectedly switches voices & points of view, & because he often stops his focus down very fine, giving us extreme close-ups of very small things & taking us places where we've never been-the roots of the marsh plants as the fish see them, or the water-bugs. His language is lean & supple, functional, & if his diction is sometimes startling ("And I/ feel sacred in/ you like the tongue./ See, even this/ animal's gamboge one")—it's usually both accurate & apt. Clearly he has learned from O'Hara & Williams about the poetry of the quotidian, & he's learned from the French symbolists as well-his excellent poem "Passivation" is built, like Mallarme's Un Coup de Des . . . . , around a single conditional clause, whose phrases form the titles of each section. In one passage of this poem he demonstrates how language can transform description into enactment—

O beautiful pale seagull who
stands near the trucks and
tractors and when they
start, looks around
surprised and turns (into whose wings
open from him) and change

That's a rich & complex poem on how to live in a world that's both, sustaining & "corroding."—

  O great world that trains me! that loses my
head in the balance of coordination, even when
I'm ripe. I sting myself.

Once in a while Ceravolo writes a corny little nature poem, á la low-intensity Williams, but in general the collection is very strong. The Frank O'Hara Award is off to a fine start.

Volume One in the Follett Publishing Co.'s "Big Table Series of Younger Poets" (Does that sound vaguely familiar?) is William Knott's The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans.[3] Now, Ezra Pound said years ago that "you can always tell the bad critic because he begins by talking about the poet instead of the poem," but in Knott's case I can't resist starting at the 'wrong' end because his publisher, & he himself, have gone about so methodically to manufacture a myth in which to shroud some essentially ordinary poems with the allure of mystery. On the jacket the poet says of himself, "Bill Knott (1940-1966) is a virgin and a suicide," & the unsigned blurb talks about this "mysterious young Midwestern poet who calls himself Saint Geraud." The editor's foreword tells us that in 1966 Knott sent a mimeographed letter to "poets, critics, and readers of contemporary literature" announcing his own 'suicide' in conventionally mawkish circumstances: orphan, unlaid, tenement room in lonely, bleak North Side Chicago. It all sounds pretty lame, even as a PR gimmick: the eternal adolescent, threatening suicide so that "you'll all miss me when I'm gone." Knott is currently living in New York, incidentally.

But the poems themselves. When I first saw some of them, in TriQuarterly two years ago, I was struck by their intensity, & by their sharp & powerful imagery. But they have not kept well, & seeing a whole book of them is no help. The short poems are meretriciously startling: they seize the attention & sympathy & then fail to engage them, or else trail off into rhetorical fluff. Others are sensational, insisting on sensation for its own sake. Compare either of these poems (much praised in the Middlewest)—

POEM The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead.

DEATH
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

—with these two lines, by a poet who truly thought & grieved about death, the real death of a real child:

For sothe ther fleten to me fele,
To thenke hir color so clad in clot.

But Knott really does have some steam & some talent. This poem, for instance—

What language will be safe
When we lie awake all night
Saying palm words, no fingertip words
This wound searching us for a voice
Will become a fountain with rooms to let
Or a language composed of kisses and leaves

—is a fine, strong thing for the first four lines (Cf. Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus). But in its two closing lines it collapses into easy imagery & fake surrealism. There are also some anti-Viet Nam War poems here which, if they work at all, work because they are pure rant, & capture that rage & frustration that can't be articulated. I just wish he would spare us the adolescent sentimentality of leaving kisses in the "nests" of his girl's black bra. & I really wish that he & his flacks would turn off the myth machine.

A number of large commercial houses have begun publishing first books by young poets who have not yet been thru the "natural selection process of the little magazines & small presses," as one senior editor put it. One of these first books is Sidney Goldfarb's Speech, For Instance.[4] In that collection, in a poem called "Customs," Goldfarb tells us, "I have nothing to declare but energy!" But clearly he is smuggling some other things, rare & valuable, which we can all use more of: humor, intelligence, & compassion that doesn't degenerate into sentiment. In a jacket blurb Robert Lowell writes that "Goldfarb has genius," which is true, I suppose, if it means simply that he has a very large talent. But Lowell also says that Goldfarb's lines are short, which is not always true, & that "Goldfarb derives from no one," which isn't true at all. Sidney Goldfarb is a young poet who derives from Whitman via Apollinaire, Williams, & the modern Russian poets. The mixture, however, is fresh & exciting. He has a good ear for conversations which have never occurred outside his poems, which at their best are enactments of affective states, rather than talk about them. Check out the opening of "Moving Breakfast."

I get out of bed without breaking anything
I give my daughter Cheerios and bananas for breakfast
First I let her stand on the table
Then I let her put her foot in the cereal
I put on my necktie because I have one
I go outside and find myself in Chicago
I say, "Boston, you faker, cut that out!"

He often plays phrases against line-endings in an intricate counterpoint of accent & sense.—

You can stay
              but you know
                           there 's no place
for affection,
              no occasion
                           for comfort
in the crossing
              of ways.
                           You can speak
but you know
              there's no place
                           for affection
making other
              in special,
                           the one,
the woman
              or the son
                           at best a moment,
isolate
              and circled
                           with the stench
of despair.

That "Border Song" is a powerful statement of the search for some country, some location or community in which affection & poetry can occur, truly & viably. In "Customs," from which I've already quoted, Goldfarb gets across entertainingly his sense of the past as it's manifested in this individual, this Sidney Goldfarb—a family history, a tradition from which something usable may be salvaged with a struggle. But that poem & the best of these poems aren't merely entertaining, but wise in a way that is all the more impressive for its lack of pretension. There are some weaker poems here too, attempts at a kind of surrealism which don't come off, & at least one poem, "The Man at the Embossing Machine," sounds like it was written for someone's (perhaps Lowell's) poetry workshop. Too easy. But what marks this first collection is its zip, its range, & its fun.

There isn't anything unusual in a large publishing house snapping up a young writer after his commercial value has been tested in the little magazine & small press wars. But it's often amusing to see the big fellows proven wrong. Grove Press, for instance, published Richard Brautigan's first novel & tried to push it as a "Beat Generation" book. It wasn't, but Grove Press people have a bizarre single-mindedness. When the book bombed, they abandoned him.—Now Brautigan's second novel, Trout Fishing in America, has become an underground (or underwater) classic that has, finally, surfaced. Originally published rather unobtrusively by Don Allen's Four Seasons Foundation, the book had gone into four printings & sold some 25,000 copies—with negligible advertising & promotion. All it has done is to seize the imagination of this generation in a totally new yet accurate way. Now it has been collected in a handsome hardcover volume (designed by the author), together with another Brautigan novel, In Watermelon Sugar, & his selected poems, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, by Delacorte Press, which has also issued the three books individually in paperback.[5]

One difficulty in reviewing Brautigan's books is that you're tempted to try to do in your own prose what he does in his. He makes it look so easy.—

    I laid the girl.
    It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish.

    Half a block from Broadway and Columbus is Hotel Trout Fishing in America, a cheap hotel. It is very old and run by some Chinese. They are young and ambitious Chinese and the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol.

    The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food.

    The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

Many reviewers have tried to do that, & of course they can't. But I don't even want to review Trout Fishing in America. I just want you to read it because it is one of the funniest books you will ever read, a book you may not want to read on the bus to work because it will keep you laughing out loud & everyone else on the bus will turn to see what's the matter with you, but you won't be able to stop reading, or laughing. It is also a very moving book. Sometimes you will finish a chapter & you will just put the book down in your lap & look out the window for a while, trying to keep the fleeting savor of what Brautigan has made you feel, a feeling you will not have any words to describe. I don't.

Brautigan's language is magical, & absolutely accurate, a kind of lens which allows you to see his vision of America, an America you never suspected was there, but of course it has been there all along, & you have lived in it, & now you recognize it. His prose is a poet's prose, in which each word, each image, has been chosen with intelligent & sensitive care. Yet it is not "poetic," but usually flat, modulating at times into an intensely understated lyricism. His chapter "The Towel" (about a page long) can stand by itself as a quietly powerful prose poem, one whose themes are woven & whose climax is built up to with consummate skill.

So it's a fun book, & a moving one. It's also an important book: it may be the Great Gatsby of our time. & I would ask those people who think it's not a novel at all, but merely a collection of amusing vignettes-What's Benjamin Franklin's function in the novel? How does economics function there? How does nature? How does the past—both of America's history & its literature-figure in it? Why are trout described in the second chapter as "a precious & intelligent metal," but not silver, rather steel? & having answered that, what is John Dillinger doing in there? Finally, how is the last chapter, together with its prologue, a final summation of a noble yet un-'Romantic' statement of the human condition?

In Watermelon Sugar is another story. Its atmosphere is at once concrete & evanescent. It takes place in a land where the sun shines a different color each day, & where the inhabitants know the sequence. The surface of the novel is gentle, even banal, but under that surface lurk predictability and repression-self-repression. The irony is all the more cutting for its subtlety. The 'villain' of the piece, inBOIL, lives in "the forgotten works," where things are found which no one can even name. He is right when he tells the 'white hats' of the novel, who live in a kind of commune called iDEATH, that they don't know anything about iDEATH. "This is iDEATH," he tells them as he cuts off his fingers & his nose. The 'good' characters have insulated themselves from death, & even from all intense emotions, in various ways, but the crucial device is repression, & the 'heroine,' Pauline, tells inBOIL, "You are an asshole," as she mops up his blood. "And the last thing that inBOIL ever saw was Pauline standing beside him, wringing his blood out of the mop into the bucket." It is only when we come to the end of the novel that we understand fully its opening sentence: "In WATERMELON SUGAR the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster collects most of the poems Brautigan has written & published over the past ten years. Most of them are short, & many of them are funny. There are some real gems here, poems that stand up to repeated readings: "A Postcard from Chinatown," "The Sidney Greenstreet Blues," "The Fever Monument," or "1942," that begins,

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle
twenty-six years old, dead
and homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka,
his coffin travels
like the fingers
of Beethoven
over a glass
of wine.

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
a legend of my childhood, dead,
they send him back
to Tacoma —

or my own favorite, "Sit Comma and Creeley Comma"—

It's spring and the nun
like a black frog
builds her tarpaper shack
beside the lake.
How beautiful she is
(and looks) surrounded
by her rolls of tarpaper.
They know her name
and they speak her name.

But mostly his poems are either very clever or very sentimental. Further, he seems not to have much sense of the possibilities the line proposes, so that the poems often seem like one-liner jokes chopped up into verse. But if you read these poems in the light of Brautigan's own "Private Eye Lettuce" (p. 5), you will see that he is concerned more deeply with naming things, or re-naming them, finding their true, secret name, than with any of the sentiments or jokes which form these 'poems' surfaces. That yields mixed results: while it's an admirable concern, it gets in the way of his perceiving the process involved in the things he names or defines. Definition is just that, a closing off, & what Brautigan leaves outside the door of classification is any acknowledgment of the on-going-ness of things, & of himself. That's why the poems are so easy to take. You finish one & go immediately on to the next, because the poems don't resonate beyond their final (usually very final-sounding) line. In his prose he gives himself more room & more time, & there he is more enduringly satisfying.

Anthologies seem to be the work-horses of the major houses' poetry-publishing action, the form in which poetry is most salable. This strikes me as odd, something like promoting an 'all-star' game made up entirely of left-handed players, or players whose last names end with on,' or (perhaps a more apt analogy) players with batting averages below .200. One recent 'major' anthology is The Young American Poets,[6] whose editor, Paul Carroll, has done something intelligent in making his selections—he has excluded all poets from the now-classic Grove Press anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. Carroll has understood that it would be pretty silly for a poet who was "new" in 1960 to be "young" eight years later. But after that, I'm afraid the rest is all downhill. There is just no sense of a critical imagination at work in Carroll's anthology, no discernible principle of inclusion. E.g., Carroll tells us in his preface that "the purpose of this anthology is to introduce work by young poets largely unknown at this stage," & then goes on to name some "celebrated" young poets he deliberately left out. He could have made room for them, he says, "only by excluding other poets whose work I admire. Such exclusion seemed unfair: to become known as a poet is hard enough as it is." So far so good. But then we find that he has included work by thirteen poets (better than 20% of his roster) who have published at least one book with a major commercial house or university press & two of these have edited their own anthologies with major publishers. The question immediately comes to mind: who was excluded to make room for them?

Organizationally, the book fails badly. The poets are arranged alphabetically, putting concretists cheek by jowl with Iowa Writing Factory Products, who are rubbing elbows with Lower East Side Surrealists—as if all these directions in contemporary poetry were equally 'significant.' Now, this is a very tired brand of that old & vapid theory of some kind of 'democracy' of the arts, usually articulated as, "Oh, let's just forget all about all these schools & labels & factions, & just sit back & listen to the various & exciting voices of this poetic generation." (Elsewhere Carroll has spoken, sentimentally, of a "poetic fratricide," as if all poets were brothers.)—Sorry, no sale. The poetry of any period is not like a bowl of oatmeal, each spoonful just like the last. It is moving, in many directions, tho I won't say that anyone of them is 'forward.' & in any period the bulk of the poetry is moving in one (very general) direction, something like a weatherfront, a movement that includes within itself many individual directions, all valid-while the rest of the poetry is moving in some other direction, equally general, but opposite to the primary flow. If an anthology is a kind of map of a literary scene, its dynamics should make some sense. It ought not to be, as this one is, merely a collage of various high & low (mostly low) pressure areas.

Carroll seems to have given more attention to the packaging of his product than to its contents, that is, the poems themselves, & in his comments on individual poets he has an irritating habit of 'counting coup' rather than suggesting any handle by which the work of this or that young poet might be picked up. Instead we are given lists of the prizes they've won, the books they've published, the degrees they've taken & the schools at which they've taught. But we don't want credentials & testimonials. We want poems that speak for themselves. It might have been more useful if Carroll had given us an intelligent comment or two on what he saw in this poet's work, why he wanted to include it.

The poetry itself is mostly a bomb, I'm very sorry to say. The concretists play jejune games, the imitators of Frank O'Hara free-associate sloppily & to little purpose, & the Iowa kids count syllables. There is a good deal of bombast & self-important posturing here, but considering the average age of the contributors that's a minor fault. One thing that really disturbs me is the wholesale regression to the old neo-metaphysical 'event poem,' in which an event is recounted or an object described, one 'meaning' is extracted, & that one 'meaning' is strung out to make a single, heavy-handed point. Certainly poetry is richer than that. & so many of these young people are falling all over themselves & each other to write 'startling' images & 'strong lines.' I'd thought that we'd all had more of that than we could take once we'd got past Crashaw, with his

Hail, sister springs!
Parents of sylver-footed rills!
            Ever bubbling things!
            Thawing crystalI! snowy hills,
Still spending, never spent! I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene!

Well, "These dull notes we sing/ Discords need for helps to grace 'hem," & there are enough discords in here to grace Ted Berrigan's "Tambourine Life" pretty good, tho that poem doesn't need foils. Berrigan's poem, while it goes on a little too long, is impressive for its humor, its living speech rhythms & diction, & for its richness of tone & texture. Check out the number of times & the shifting contexts in which the word "life" is repeated. & pay attention, too, to the way he breaks up the surface of his poem.—It is clearly a performance piece, & Berrigan is constantly moving back & forth between the occasion of the poem's composition, its presentation at a live reading, & the various scenes the poem enacts. It's a solid job.

The only other high-pressure area in the collection is Gerard Malanga's use of the line. Malanga commits most of his neighbor-poets' faults, but he is the only one among them who has some sense of what a line can do, & plays off dependent clauses against each other, so that each line resonates slightly differently as the poem unfolds. The result is a much richer linguistic surface than any other work in the anthology.

Ten years ago Philip Whalen characterized his poetry as "a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here & now which is history . . . and you." He has been busily & dedicatedly graphing that moving mind for some twenty years, & now for the first time (& it's about time!) we have something like a complete record of his achievement. On Bear's Head[7] is more like a massive notebook than a volume of collected' poems, especially because, as Whalen insists, he's still busy turning out more poems.

There are really only a half-dozen living, practicing poets in America right now from whom I or any poet, young or old, can take instruction. Whalen is one of them. He shows how to get it done. —It is done daily. It is done by listening, very rigorously, to the speech of the people down the street, to the speech of your own hungry belly & longing arms, because it is thru these voices that all of the past & present can be heard, crying & laughing by turns. Whalen is an excellent teacher precisely because, as he himself insists, he is not trying "to inherit [Dr. Johnson's] mantle as a literary dictator but only the title Doctor, i.e., teacher who—is constantly studying." In the twenty years' work which this book conveniently brings together, Whalen is constantly studying, constantly listening to various voices, & yielding them the forms they demand: lyrics, epigrams, didactics, odes, meditations, satires, whatever. & his mention of Dr. Johnson is not gratuitous. Whalen's poems, for all their seeming inchoateness, have an elegance of form which was one chief goal of the major 18th-century poets. A Whalen poem is typically spread out all over the page, a jangle of capitals, italics, asterisks, rules, brackets, & quotations of various voices, the 'noble dead' next to teen-age girls on a bus. But the sprawl achieves a functional shape, integrated & effective. That is, each poem is a unique form transferring insights with their concomitant affective states, which is as it should be. "There is no intelligence without emotion," says Ezra Pound. One recurrent shape that Whalen's longer poems take is that of the mosaic. Personal scenes & utterances are set next to quotations from friends, or the classics (of Greece or Rome or the Orient), or from science, philosophy, history; time & space are 'kinked' to bring disparate scenes into contact. Till the shape of the whole reveals the interrelationships of its parts.

There are such varieties of excellences here that it's difficult to characterize the book as a whole. Whalen's voice is as sure in the direct, flat statement of "For C."—

I wanted to bring you this Jap Iris
Orchid-white with yellow blazons
But I couldn't face carrying it down the street
Afraid everyone would laugh
And now they're dying of my cowardice—

as it is in the quirky, magical language of "Three Mornings"—

I wait for breakfast to drop from the sky
            foghorns,     cluster of churchbells
                                      pale sun butter
                               traffic airplane marmalade
salt & pepper avocado branch squeak on window
                               I drink last night's cold tea.

One trait that comes thru very strongly is his humor, a healthy consciousness of how he looks & sounds. (Except for Chaucer, & maybe some of the Falstaff scenes, On Bear's Head is the only book of poetry that ever made me actually laugh out loud as I read it, late one night, all by myself.) His humor is an apt corrective for his occasional flights into sententiousness or his sinkings into self-pity. When he does those things he is aware of them, & the humor cuts him down to human size. But don't be fooled: he may be funny, but he is not frivolous. The humor doesn't take anything away from his vision, but adds a dimension that many 'major' poets lack.— & Whalen is definitely a major poet. This book is all about living in the world as it's shaped from day to day by the recent & the distant past (which is what we're all doing), simultaneously alone & in the company of everybody else (which is where we all are). It's a great feast.

Something needs to be said about this book's price, but I don't know what that thing is. $17.50 makes no sense at all to me, & neither do the three explanations I've had from people connected with the book's production. All I can tell you is that a "reasonably priced" paperback edition is now available, which you should look for & buy, & read, because it will do you a lot of good.

Way back in 1938 Ezra Pound dedicated Kulchur to Louis Zukofsky & Basil Bunting, "strugglers in the desert." & Basil Bunting might still be struggling in that desert if Hugh Kenner & Robert Creeley hadn't rescued him from the oblivion of a Newcastle financial column to bring him to America to teach & to read his poems, & if Fulcrum Press hadn't begun publishing his books. Now, thirty years after that first recognition, Fulcrum has given us his Collected Poems.[8] It's a slim volume, considering the years that went into it, but it is almost all gold, pure & finely wrought. Bunting is a poet who is as much at ease in history as Pound, a man who demonstrates (with less stridency than Pound) how it is that the past—both a man's personal history & that larger biography, the life of the race as preserved in its literature—wells up & becomes actual in the present of the poem. Bunting's voice at times modulates into that of Villon's Belle Heaulmiere, or that of Dante—

muttering inaudibly beneath the quagmire,
irresolute, barren, dependent, this page
ripped from Love's ledger and Poetry's:
and besides I want you to know for certain
there are people under the water. They are sighing.
The surface bubbles and boils with their sighs.
Look where you will you see it.
The surface sparkles and dances with their sighs
as though Styx were silvered by a wind from Heaven.

But these voices are never literary allusions. They are instances of the weight & density of the present: one man's search for something of enduring value is the race's search. That's why Bunting's "overdraft" of Catullus' We mi par esse deo videtur is not a 'mistranslation,' but a restatement of a perennial condition.—

O, it is Godlike to sit selfpossessed
when her chin rises and she turns to smile;
but my tongue thickens, my ears ring,
what I see is hazy.

The Catullus itself is, of course, an "overdraft" of Sappho. (How succinct Bunting's pun is.)

Included here is Bunting's marvelous long poem "Briggfiatts," that vast & complex meditation on love, time, death, & poetry-love forgotten & love remembered, brought to life in stanzas that sing in blocks of sound as solid as the marble gravestone which is one of the poem's recurrent figures.

A mason times his mallet
to a lark's twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his role
at a letter's edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.

(The diction is absolutely precise: "Abolish" is from abolescere: "to decay gradually.") That gravestone, the above-ground memorial to those who lie rotting beneath it, is a continuing concern.—How is poetry to keep love alive?

Shining slowworm part of the marvel.
The mason stirs:
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.

Or how is love to keep poetry alive?

He lies with one to long for another,
sick, self-maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born.

In the sureness of its meter, the richness of its alliteration, & the restraint with which it reveals the poet's heart, we can hear in Bunting's poetry echoes of the Anglo-Saxon scop—

        Ic to sothe wat
thaet bith on eorle     inndi'yhten theaw
thaet he his ferhth-Iocan     faeste binde,
healde his hord-cofan    hycge swa he wille.

& that resonance adds a further weight, the weight of history, to his most personal utterance. But tho Bunting is more personal than the bulk of Pound, there is still quite a distance between the speaker of these poems & the events he animates. He is not a spontaneous or a 'confessional' poet, what Olson called "the private soul at any public wall." But he is true to himself & true to his craft. To use his own phrase, he lays the tune frankly on the air. His book is a solid pleasure.

Obviously there were many more excellent books by poets new in one sense or another published in the past couple of years. If I had more room I'd tell you about David Bromige's The Ends of the Earth,[9] Rochelle Owens' Salt and Core,[10] & Richard Duerden's The Left Hand, or The Glory of Her,[11] simply to name a few. I would not, under any circumstances, discuss Creeley's or Lowell's new books. Those poets have their audiences, which know what to expect, or can at any rate judge for themselves. There are really only two reasons for doing reviews: either to deflate a specious myth, or to bring to the attention of a wider audience work that deserves that audience. I only hope that you will continue to search out good new poetry, particularly where it's most likely to be found-in the little magazines & the small presses. If the mimeograph revolution doesn't perpetuate itself it will not have borne fruit at all; it will merely have installed itself as a new establishment.

1. Jack Collom, Wet, Boulder, Colo., privately printed.
2. Joseph Ceravolo, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, N.Y., The Frank O'Hara Foundation at Columbia University Press
3. Saint Geraud (pseudo., William Knott), The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, Chicago, Follett Publishing Co.
4. Sidney Goldfarb, Speech, For Instance, N.Y., Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
5. Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, N.Y., Delacorte Press.
6. Paul Carroll (editor), The Young American Poets, Chicago, Follett Publishing Co.
7. Philip Whalen, On Bear's Head, N.Y., Harcourt, Brace & World.
8. Basil Bunting, Collected Poems, London, Fulcrum Press.
9. David Bromige, The Ends of the Earth, Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
10. Rochelle Owens, Salt and Core, Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press.
11. Richard Duerden, The Left Hand, or The Glory of Her, San Francisco, Cranium Press.