Don McKay: Essays on His Works Book

Among the many poets whose works are discussed in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the most prominent are: Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, John Cage...

Arthur Rimbaud...
There is no real precedent for the anti-paysage of the Illuminations. The first thing to say about the "cities" evoked in "Les Ponts" and "Métropolitain," in "Parade" and "Promontoire," is that, in the words of Rimbaud's "Barbare," "elles n'existent pas." These dream landscapes, at once present and absent, concrete and abstract, are composed of particulars that cannot be specified, of images that refuse to cohere in a consistent referential scheme. Indeed, exteernal reference seems peculiarly irrelevant in the case of these poems. Does "Métropolitain" refer to the London "tube" or to the suburban railway that enters a tunnel and goes underground within city limits, or to neither? Is the palace described in "Promontoire" the Grand Hotel that opened in Scarborough in 1867, and, if so, how can its facades be decorated with "tarantellas"? Are the crystal and wood chalets that move on invisible rails in "Villes I" meant to evoke one of the Alpine funiculars erected in the 1870s? These speculations lead nowhere, for the context in which such references are embedded repeatedly provides conflicting evidence. Why, for example, are "barges" found in the smoky underground world of "Métropolitain"?
[...]
- "Trouver une langue": The Anti-paysage of Rimbaud, pg. 45-46

Gertrude Stein...
In 1915, the most popular book of poems in America was Edgar Lee Masters's collection of imaginary epitaphs called Spoon River Anthology.[...]
The appeal of such a poem was entirely dependent on its subject matter; Masters's graveyard poems promised major revelations about the hypocrisy of small-town Puritan America with its face-saving ruses, the disparity between genteel appearance and harsh reality, the sufferings of the little people at the expense of the smug rich.[...]
How to compose a literary portrait that might avoid such dreary literalness - this was a problem that preoccupied Gertrude Stein in the years preceding the War.[...]
- Poetry a Word System: The Art of Gertrude Stein, pg. 67-

William Carlos Williams...
In the spring of 1922, the Little Review published a special number devoted to Francis Picabia. Aside from Picabia's own Dada compositions (poems, paintings, the manifesto "Anticoq"), the issue included such items as two Cocteau poems ("Saluant Picabia" and "Saluant Tzara"), Gertrude Stein's "Vacation in Brittany," Sherwood Anderson's essay, "The Work of Gertrude Stein," and the first installment of a translation of Apollinaire's Les Peintres cubistes (1913).
One of the most enthusiastic readers of the Picabia number was William Carlos Williams. "It gives me," he wrote in a letter to the editor, "the sense of being arrived, as of any efficient engine in motion." "I enjoyed thoroughly, absorbedly, Apollinaire's article." Not surprisingly, Spring and All, published the following year in Paris by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, pays homage to Apollinaire's famous essay. Indeed, Spring and All, a book of twenty-seven lyrics dispersed among passages of prose of varying length and tone, is Williams's most "French" composition.[...]
- "Lines Converging and Crossing": The "French" Decade of William Carlos Williams, pg. 109-110

Ezra Pound...
My title comes from W.B. Yeats, whose severe judgement of the Cantos in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) had, so said his old friend Ezra Pound, "done more to prevent people reading Cantos for what is on the page than any other smoke screen." "Like other readers," said Yeats in his Preface, "I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments. He [Pound] hopes to give the impression that all is living, that there are no edges, no convexities, nothing to check the flow. . . ." There follows the "bloody paragraph" that so angered Pound:
When I consider his work as a whole I find more style, more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it than in any contemporary poet known to me, but it is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion. . . . Style and its opposite can alternate, bu form must be full, sphere-like, single. Even where there is no interruption, he is often content, if certain verses and lines have style, to leave unbridged transitions, unexplained ejaculations, that make his meaning unintelligible. . . . Even where the style is sustained throughout one gets an impression, especially when he is writing in verse libre, that he has not got all the wine into the bowl, that he is a brilliant improvisator. . . .
To read this commentary today is to learn to what a surprising extent "Modernism" has already become part of literary history. For Yeats's negatives have become the positives of a later generation of poets, of those like Allen Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara or Ed Dorn who want precisely to convey the "living flow" of experience, to dispense with "edges" and "convexities" in favor of the poem as a "field of action".[...]
- "No Edges, No Convexities": Ezra Pound and the Circle of Fragments, pg. 155-156

Samuel Beckett...
The "interfering" images that jostle one another on the "documentary surface" or "shallow screen" of Pound's Cantos are, we have seen, insistently illusionistic. We can, after all, go to San Vitale or to Magdalen ("rhyming dawdlin'") College, Oxford, and we know what "Kung" (Confucius) and "Uncle William" (Yeats) are people who once were alive. Pound's "shrines," that is to say, have real deities in them. It is their collision that creates "the opening of the field."
The indeterminacy of Beckett's verbal compositions is of a very different order. The frame of reference is at once wider and narrower. Beckett does not people his fictions with Greek goddesses, Renaissance war lords, or old friends. His characters, when they have names at all, are called Pim and Bom, Winnie and Willie, Hamm and Clover. They dwell neither on Mt. Taishan nor in Kensington but in an unspecified room or in an open space, which may or may not be in a town. For in Beckett's world, it is not the juxtaposition of items drawn disparate contexts that creates semantic gaps. Rather, the enigma is created by the "fragility" of the words themselves, words whose meanings are constantly eroded and reformulated.[...]
- "The Space of a Door": Beckett and the Poetry of Absence, pg. 200

John Ashbery...
In 1955 both Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery entered the annual competition for the Yale Younger Poets Award. The outcome of this contest is one of the nice ironies of literary history. The judge that year was W.H. Auden, and he originally declared that none of the manuscripts submitted deserved to win the prize. But then, by Ashbery's account, the following happened:
. . . someone, a mutual friend, possibly Chester Kallman, told Auden - by that time he'd gone to Ischia for the summer - that Frank and I both submitted. And he asked us through his friend to send our manuscripts, which we did, and then he chose mine, although I never had felt that he particularly liked my poetry, and his introduction to the book is rather curious, since it doesn't really talk about the poetry. He mentions me as being a kind of successor to Rimbaud, which is very flattering, but at the same time I've always had the feeling that Auden probably never read Rimbaud. He was very outspokenly anti-French.
Auden's Foreword to Some Trees, published by Yale in 1956, is a curious document. The comparison between Ashbery and Rimbaud leads Auden to the following rather back-handed compliment:
Where Wordsworth had asked the question, "What is the language really used by men?" Rimbaud substituted the question, "What is the language really used by the imagining mind?"
In "Les Illuminations" he attempted to discover this new rhetoric, and every poet who, like Mr. Ashbery, has similar interests has the same problem. . . . the danger for a poet working with the subjective life is. . . . realizing that, if he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas, he is tempted to manufacture calculated oddities as if the subjectively sacred were necessarily and on all accounts odd.
This emphasis on Ashbery's "calculated oddities," his "strange juxtapositions of imagery" is put even more bluntly in Auden's letter of rejection to O'Hara:
I'm sorry to have to tell you that, after much heart searching I chose John's poems. It's really very awkward when the only two possible candidates are both friends.
This doesn't mean that I don't like your work; lots of the poems I like very much, particularly Jane Awake.
I think you (and John too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any "surrealistic" style, namely the confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.
It is hardly surprising that Auden would have misgivings about a poetic style so seemingly unlike his own, and so startling a departure from the carefully controlled neo-Symbolic poetry that dominated the early fifties.[...]
- "Mysteries of Construction": The Dream Songs of John Ashbery, pg. 248-250

John Cage...
If, as John Ashbery suggests in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, "Today has no margins, the event arrives / Flush with its edges," perhaps the very notion of the poem as "preconceived object," as a set of words arranged on the page according to plan, needs to be reassessed. In Chapter Six of the Poetics, Aristotle lists the six constituent parts of tragedy (for him the supreme form of poetry) as mythos (plot), ethos (character), dianoia (thought), lexis (diction), melopoeia (rhythm and song), and opsis (spectacle). Romantic and Modernist theory elevated the second, fourth, and fifth of these elements: poetry, it was and still is assumed, involves the presentation of a self (the "ethical argument") in terms of appropriate lexis and melopoeia. In practise, lexis means connotative, multi-layered language and symbolic imagery, whereas ethos has generally been construed as some form of psychological depth. In the past few decades, however, the pendulum has begun to swing. Performance, which Michel Benamou calls "the unifying mode of the postmodern," is, by definition, an art form that involves opsis; it establishes a unique relationship between artist and audience. More important, performance poetry, as it has been practiced by such artists as John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, reintroduces narrative into the lyric structure, whereas dianoia, declare out of court in Symbolist aesthetic, is curiously coming in by the back door.
I present this schematic account of the Aristotelian model only to remind the reader that poiesis can be many different things. This is, I think, a necessary reminder, for contemporary criticism has been peculiarly uncomprehending of if not downright hostile to such compositions as the lecture-poetry of John Cage and the "talk poems" of David Antin. When William Spanos, the enterprising editor of Boundary 2, wanted to publish Antin's "what am i doing here?", an improvisation first performed at the San Francisco Poetry Centre in 1973 and only then transcribed on the typewriter and presented on the page without left and right margins and with spaces of varying length to mark natural pauses, his co-editor, Robert Kroetsch, was highly skeptical. In a letter to Antin (5 October 1974), subsequently published as part of a fascinating three-way debate among Antin, Spanos, and Kroetsch on the meaning and value of Antin's text and, by implication, on the nature of poetry in general, Kroetsch makes what are surely typical objections:
1. The talk-poem . . . assumes that to write at all is somehow to create art. To justify this assumption you have to negate imagination. . . .
2. Your talk-poem becomes poem as pure content. It is not a solution to bu an avoidance of the problem of form. In art I look for the tension of opposing forces. . . .
3. You poetry as "uninterruptable discourse" is uninterruptable simply in the sense that a nervous lecturer is uninterruptable.
4. Your stance is a naive one. Naive in its avoidance of selection. . . . Naive . . . in assuming that to talk about writing a poem is to write one. . . .
These four reservations boil down to one simple objection: Antin's "talk pieces," which he himself described as "notation of scores of oral poems with margins consequently unjustified," have no form; they merely go on and on. For not only do the talk poems do away with meter; they even avoid that last stronghold of contemporary free verse - lineation.[...]
- "No More Margins": John Cage, David Antin, and the Poetry of Performance, pg. 288-290