SINCERITY IS A GIFT: Green, Niedecker, Wescott, Noll

To begin

there is the possible hint of irony in this photograph… though that popular and ever contemporary  illusion of an alternative to an acceptance that each day is in some sense a constant postponement of a willful end to this thing called living, undermines any possibility of mourning, of regretting, of loving, of hating, of…

and while the tombstone for Hannah Green is self-explanatory, the second photograph is only that, a picture, of the cabin on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River in Wisconsin near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin where Lorine Niedecker lived and wrote her claim upon posterity: a posterity in the forms of a collected poetry/prose works from the University of California Press,  two books of letters to/from Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman,  a couple of books of selected poems and the resulting:a few studies of her work, a biography,  a room in the Hoard Museum in Fort Atkinson, which contains her writing desk, a few paintings that were in her cabin, a few manuscript pages and copies of manuscripts--- while the local library has her archives.  There is a state marker on the road in front of this house on Blackhawk Island  which is still a private residence.. 

        What one knows of her life: writing poetry, the dreary work of washing floors in the local hospital, other menial work…two years of college at Beloit and leaving to take care of ailing parents and being without money, an abortion of twins fathered by Louis Zukofsky… a correspondence with a few people out in the world… but of course  the poetry is meant to…

From  NORTH CENTRAL

Lake Superior

In every part of every living thing

is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals

of the rock.

OR

From THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green:

  I have tried to write, seemingly, a very real book, which is, in fact, a dream.  I got the idea from life, but I have proceeded from vision.  I have made use in equal parts of memory, record, and imagination.  Members of my family and other people, I have loved, my feelings about them, and theirs about one another and many other things as well, have provided the inspiration, the starting point, for this novel but the characters in this book bear no more relation to their real-life counterparts than the characters in a play bear to the actors when they have left the stage.

 FOUR

At Beloit College, I walked about the campus where I had spent three years (the junior year was in Dublin as I dropped out of Beloit---) a pretty campus looking the way a campus is supposed to look: late 19^th century buildings, lots of trees, the ugly modern science building, all built on a bluff overlooking a debased and broken city, ever trying to come back: riddled with poverty and crime, mixed with natural food stores and cute gift shops… but Beloit was Bink Noll who died in his late 50s… three little books of poetry… and in a letter 8/10/86 to me--- three months before his death--- he wrote:

You are, of course, feverishly bookish, and I love you for it; but as for myself I don’t think books count for much--- esp. “creative” ones. I favor them, too--- read quite a bit, among other things; but all in all I don’t think they  (writing them) are a satisfactory way of generating self-esteem.  I set great store by happiness and see that most famous authors and literary ones, too, are fairly miserable.  I have been spending the summer among strewn corpses, no better for their delusions about craft and talent while they lived.  I prize your happiness.  Keep writing but “without attachment,” treating your stuff,  mine, and everybody else’s as the ephemera and mere amusement that it surely is. 

                                FOUR

To underscore:  ephemera, ephemera ephemera…  the University of Wisconsin bookstore in Madison is a vast t-shirt superstore… there is only one bookstore, Paul’s, on street level on State Street, and that presided over by an elderly woman... there are no independent bookstores in Menasha, Neenah, Appleton or Oshkosh… (home to a branch of the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and Lawrence University in Appleton). There is a Half Priced bookstore in the mall zone near Walmart and Target.

                                   FOUR
  None of the three librarians I talked to in Neenah and Menasha public libraries had heard of Lorine Niedecker or Glenway Wescott.  This is not unusual as they spend a large part of their days helping people get on the internet.   
In the Neenah library where I had begun a manual search through the microfilm version of the Post Crescent newspaper for a poem I thought I had published there in the early 70s;  another woman was copying obituaries for a newsletter of some sort. 

    Eventually one of the librarians suggested I use an internet search of that paper which they subscribed to.  I did not find the poem but I did find a letter I had published on 19 September 1971  suggesting that the killing of George Jackson--- do you remember who that is?--- was a murder perpetrated by the prison guards. 

                                       FOUR

After this visit to where my parents had lived in exile from 1965-1972 I drove for Milwaukee by way of Kewaskum as that is where Glenway Wescott is from. 

Wescott is another writer who has shaped me.  For a long time  I would argue if we in the US need the great American novel his THE GRANDMOTHERS is a worthy candidate.   

And then I had that his title essay from GOODBYE WISCONSIN is a necessary addition to who he is.  I do know he acquired brief  contemporary fame later on for a short novel THE PILGRIM HAWK and that is how most people today will meet his work.

Jerry Rosco has been a tireless promoter of Wescott with a biography and the editing of two volumes of Wescott’s journals and a book of his short fiction… and while his immediate claim upon the current moment is through his never hidden homosexuality he is of course far more than just that… something the poet Elizabeth Bishop understood in not allowing her work to appear in anthologies devote to “poetry by women” and the same could be said of Hannah Green who was happy with the simple declaration: Hannah Green is a writer.

 Wescott appears in the first year of the first version of Julian Green’s journal and it is to me the closest definition of my whole experience of writing:

19 December 1928:  Lunched yesterday with Wescott.  He told me that it seemed to him impossible for a journal to be written that should be absolutely sincere and bear the stamp of truth.  But sincerity is a gift--- one among others. To wish to be sincere is not enough.

I have often thought Green was “a success” only because of the gift of his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In Goodbye Wisconsin, Wescott writes, 

“By birth the best of these young people are Protestants of some sort; by accident, or thanks to their own efforts, the classic Protestant rules have given way to an almost equally scrupulous open-mindedness.”

Of course now, I would suggest an open mind is an empty mind.  The only minds I find interesting are strewn with nasty dead-ends, uncomplicated urges, irrational beliefs… and simple knowings beyond the necessity of words.

Wescott  gave in to a public amiability, a willingness to please and was unable to find his way back to his early books that still are his claim upon me--- but I will grant him his THE PILGRIM HAWK and possibly it is his A CALENDAR OF SAINTS FOR UNBELIEVERS  with its subtitle: Daily readings for eccentrics heretics revolutionaries and other fallen angels…  which might be his best claim though ironically it can really only be read by believers who are capable of understanding the necessary wit and genius of this book as it makes such uncomfortable in that all belief is always a little comic, a little tragic in the echoing of Unamuno’s: THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE, another self-defining book.

I did try with my limited ability to picture the place where Wescott came from and if only he had remained in some fashion there instead of decorating the American Academy… ironically and in a wonderful final gesture: Julian Green might have been an elected immortal to the French Academy but he had the decency before his death to try to resign…”

An aside:  I think I personally shall fail as doesn't it seem obvious from what I have just recorded.

NOTE::::THIS IS THE FIRST OF TWO PARTS:  here are 

two photographs.  What remains.  

 The first was a postcard from Juneau, Wisconsin with a 

message to Lilia back in Menasha while on  my  drive to 

see Iowa City to see Elliott Anderson 

2 June 1969:

and this photograph from this summer, 2014:

what passes and does...

THERE IS NO POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES. RONALD JOHNSON, LORINE NIEDECKER, BELOIT COLLEGE, DAVID HUDDLE

Preface No.7

The morning after the AWP Associated Writing Programs. Last night went to a reading celebrating Salmon Press at some wretched Bowery bar. The music next door was more compelling. Had a conversation about James Dickey. Even told two Dickey stories to a woman from South Carolina which is how his name is kept alive in the South. Dickey read the poem Falling at Beloit College in the early 1960s when that school did actually then ask good poets to come to the college for short visits. Now they have writers come for longer periods of time and no one remembers their names.

And Beloit College to this day never remembers that Lorine Niedecker from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, one of the great American poets, attended the college. It is all a little embarrassing for them, I suppose. Here was a woman washing hospital floors while writing poetry and corresponding with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky who both knew she was their equal. All something no college really has the ability to understand or wants to know about and anyway she had to drop out of the college for lack of money.

Back then W.H.Auden came and disgraced himself.
Charles Olson came and gave the Beloit Lectures.
Galway Kinnell came when he was still a modest author of one good poem. He became a "famous" academic poet of still one good poem. He did the illustrations for Pati Hill's`book of poems THE SNOW RABBIT when they had an affair in the early 1960s. She is still the better writer based on her IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS.
Kinnell is now retired, they say, and I suppose still an activist.

How I love that word activist.
And I am sure you do too.
When you hear the word activist you know you are hearing about some sort of crook.

Preface No. 8

It is probably true that there are no interesting living poets under the age of 60 in the United States. I did not place that age limitation on my sweeping judgment because I would not want to include David Slavitt's WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON AND OTHER POEMS however I really think there are no poets in the United States at this moment.
except for...

The last good poet in the United States was Ronald Johnson and he has been dead for ten years.
Find his ARK.
Find his other little books.
His re-write of Paradise Lost, RADI OS and of all things his four cookbooks.
Read the essays by Guy Davenport on Johnson if you don't believe me.

Preface No. 9

But you say: how extreme! You are full of it. What are you talking about?...Okay, I will introduce into evidence one poem by David Huddle.

Just before deciding to do this I had been distracted by reading in "the thoughts" of Gregory Orr in a issue of The American Poetry Review that was given away at the AWP. But to find a poem by Orr is too much of a bother. He is as pathetic now as he was back in the days when he was at Columbia University writing imitations of Mark Strand poems who in turn was imitating God knows who...and of course we all knew that Orr had killed his brother by mistake--- the sensitivity ran like wine and vomit down West End Avenue which by coincidence is where David Huddle lived back then also... but the David Huddle Story is for another time. His poem awaits you and is my evidence for my assertion: there is no poetry in the United States of America in the year 2008:

from the collection GLORY RIVER Poems to be published by Louisiana State University Press in April

1970

That moment in Hair
where the whole cast
gets naked on stage?

Lindsey and I and Jean
and Ellsworth Bahrman
bought tickets, ate grass-

laced brownies and rode
the Broadway Local downtown
to see the show, but we were way

back in the balcony,
I got sleepy, and Lindsey
had to give me an elbow

when it happened. Fact
is, I liked Hair best
the year before, at a party

in Roanoke, Virginia,
when somebody put on the record
(vinyl, of course), and a bunch

of Hollins girls started
to sing along---"I like black boys..."
and do a little footwork

that way you can step into it
when you're twenty years old,
about half-buzzed at a party

and somebody puts on a song
you like. But back to that night
when the lights came up,

and behold, there were the actors
wearing nothing but their bodies---
It was in the fall of 1970, audiences

were getting thinner every week,
and the way I see it now
is that I, David R. Huddle,

your basic twenty-eight-year-old,
moderately stoned, white,
liberal grad student, sat

right at the focal point at the exact
moment when the nation
made its final turn away from love

and generosity and toward greed,
hatred of the poor, bullying
the rest of the world, and pillaging

what's left of paradise. Please
forgive me, all of you lost
Americans. If Instead of nodding off

into a stupor--- I'd just stayed
a little more alert and received
every megabyte, of that vision, I might

have become the single human
being empowered to save
the planet from George W. Bush.

Preface No. 10

I am sure you can hear the knowing smiling applause, even the laughter when David Huddle the poet finishes reading this poem at the University of Vermont, at Bread Loaf and other stops on the usual poetic tour...

This poem is a summation of the state of poetry and indeed of the whole academic world that lives within a similar callow smugness typified by this isolated tenured academic--- You should know there is even a DAVID HUDDLE READER--- who has lived too long among like minded people up there in Vermont and now no longer knows he is living within a poorly understood bad faith, no longer self-aware of anything beyond the immediate smiling applause indicating that they are all they are all oppressed beaten down victims...

Preface No. 11

Is there any evidence out there that I am wrong?