"It's the whole modern thing"

Santa Barbara's Black Sparrow Press published hundreds of important titles until its founder, John Martin, retired in 2002 and sold the rights to certain works to Harper-Collins and, for a dollar, the remainder of its inventory to David R. Godine, who re-named the press Black Sparrow Books.

In 1978, Black Sparrow published Towards A New American Poetics: Essays & Interviews edited by Ekbert Faas. A fascinating document produced 18 years after the arrival of Donald Allen's sod-busting The New American Poetry (1960) and a good eight years before Ron Sillman's arboresque In the American Tree (1986), the book features essays on -- and interviews with -- Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg. I got the whole kit and caboodle at a garage sale last week for what Godine paid Martin for his inventory.

While it was Snyder's section I went to first, it is Duncan's that produced potential picks to what has, for me, been a largely impenetrable lock. Yes, it is the experience of the poem's writing that is important, and yes, the "co-operation" of elements is integral to any understanding of the composition, but man (and it is only men in this book) have I had a hard time caring about Duncan! Maybe now this will change.

In the meantime, let me say that of all the writers featured, it is Snyder, the proto-eco poet, whose ideas come closest to anything nearing today's social(ly) medi(c)a(ted) literary conversation. As for Duncan, although his interest in magic is consistent with a lot of witchy thinking in the written and visual arts, his elitisms are closer to the 19th century than they are to the 21st. Check out this exchange:

Faas: Do you think that open form is an American phenomenon?

Duncan: Oh, no. It's only of special significance in America.  It's the whole modern thing.

Faas: So it would be something common to the whole Western world?

Duncan: Yes, and then you have Japan, for instance, opening itself up to the West.  In a way, there are no more crucial openings. Everything has been opened up. Nobody is hiding away in a closet today -- some poor Eskimo or something.