by Jim Harrison
He thinks that his concessions like the Eucharist are rites of passage.
A poet becomes attached to the romantic in himself because it flatters his possibilities, all that is distant in him, sloth.
The rhythms of “natural speech” must be tightly controlled or avoided altogether—they lull rather than interest unless compressed into something accelerated, unnatural.
Still marrow from ancient bones—Sappho, Villon, Rabelais.
Who said “Such a price/ the Gods exact for song:/ to become what we sing.”?
He wishes to write a poem as immediately fascinating as a dirty picture.
A poet's predictable interest in fairy tales, disasters, storms, the aristocracy, hawks. Let down thy hair, Rapunzel. Dreams of impossible women.
To wait all day upon it then, very late, to have a door open for you that you did not think existed: all fears gone, sweetness, nonchalance—to expand and draw the whole rotten earth in and mingle with its rottenness and sweetness.
One must write as if things had to be said all over again—though poetry is noncumulative it takes craw or perhaps stupidity to try to write after an evening reading Shakespeare. The great ones create a temporary silence around their work which stuns nearly all of us, excluding doctoral candidates.
You push yourself to the edge until you become the edge and teeter on yourself—but there is no edge, only new modes of consciousness swimming into one another.
These motions are not convinced of themselves. To translate plain into plain, devoid of gaggery.
I can never become an active poet in the sense that I would be willing to become an apologist for a school or group.
The “sublime” and discouragement: you cannot hope, unless you are one of the isolate giants which you are not, to write a sublime poem. But you don't write poems in competition with any other poet—your energies are directed at a final harmony, the balance of imaginative richness and pure form.
Your work will never appear miraculous to you because it has cost you so much effort and pain. The senses that you hammer at nightly are incapable of surprise—the monstrous perception is usual.
When you were still “political” you often despised poetry as a game—now your elaborate sense of play has made you a word addict and bored with the hemorrhage of news.
I heard that Roethke died last week. Along with Lowell he was considered to be the best of the “middle-generation"—the colonizers rather than explorers. Consequently too much of their work is domestic and housebroken to be great. Both of them mildly insane with alcohol problems—cause, symptom, neither? Usually rather read Goll. Polite quarrels between schools here while fine truly new work appears in Spain, South America and Germany. A time of inhalation.
It is possible to tread water until you are unable to do anything else.
A poetry diseased with streetlights, a fine layer of lint and odor of carbon. Unpleasant marriages, smell of the classroom and household gods. No sun, mad dogs or death.
You must often hate poetry in order to write good poems.
Remember: vividness, lucidity, momentum. A poem should not resemble “poetry” too closely. The first impulse on reading a true poem is almost awkward. Lines should not be anticipated nor should a line be diffuse unless it conceals a jolt. Some sort of unexampled tension, not necessarily to be resolved, is characteristic of good poems. And not merely a tension purely of language but in the objects and their emotional equivalents. If a single line is to serve as a fulcrum it must be doubly sharp, hard and lucid. The whole point about a short lyric is to make the moment durable.
1965
Bending the Bow, by Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan must certainly be our most difficult active poet. Bending the Bow is for the strenuous, the hyperactive reader of poetry; to read Duncan with any immediate grace would require Norman O. Brown's knowledge of the arcane mixed with Ezra Pound's grasp of poetics. Though Duncan avows himself a purely derivative poet, his capacities are monstrous and have taken a singular direction: in Duncan the range of affection is great and nothing is barred entrance into the “field” of composition. The structure of Bending the Bow is the “grand collage.” It is for this reason that his poetry has been called cluttered and self-defeating, even swollen and diversive by his admirers.
These qualifications are only relevant if we are unable to transcend our purely linear sense of what a poem should be. In the “Passages,” a sequence that makes up the bulk of Bending the Bow, there is a total lack of the usual sociological and geometric hints, the “top to bottom” sensation that usually leads us through the most wantonly modernist poem. Rather, the impression is like a block of weaving, if that is possible. In Duncan the poem is not the paradigm but the source, the competitor and not the imitator, of nature.
Form in the “Passages” is a four-dimensional process, constantly active, never passive, moving through time with the poet. The poems are music-based rather than ideational, the rhythms concentrated in time, avoiding any strict sense of measure. Duncan's poems may be gnomic and expansive, simultaneously aerial and kinetic, though never, as in the work of so many contemporary poets, solely concerned with the fact of a process whose only virtue is to describe itself accurately. Instead of concluding in the orthodox sense, the poems unfold in gradations or seem to reach toward the end of a natural arc.
Another more obvious stumbling point for the reader is Duncan's aggressive syncretism: he is personal rather than confessional and writes within a continuity of tradition. It simply helps to be familiar with Dante, Blake, mythography, medieval history, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Pound, Stein, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and Levertov.
The difficulties in Duncan are mitigated somewhat by his fine introduction. He explains: “The poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it . . . the poet works with a sense of parts fitting in relation to a design that is larger than the poem. The commune of Poetry becomes so real that he sounds each particle in relation to parts of a great story that he knows will never be completed. A word has the weight of an actual stone in his hand. The tone of a vowel has the color of a wing.” The largesse exists for the capable reader—we have the salve, too, of the lyric. Here are the last two stanzas of “My Mother Would be a Falconress”:
My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld.
I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.
But to emphasize Duncan's lyric poems is to avoid our responsibility. We have done the same in the past by reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to the exclusion of the Prophetic Books. The finest of Duncan's “Passages,” numbers 24 to 30, give a sense of war and bleakness that is at the same time physiological and metaphysical. They are neither doctrinaire nor programmatic; we have simply not had their equal as poems in the past several years, not, anyway, since Theodore Roethke's Far Field or Robert Lowell's Life Studies or Charles Olson's Maximus Poems.
I have not done much here but anticipate objections to a splendid book. I don't feel it necessary to inherit all the literary prejudices of a previous generation, whatever the convictions. The failure of readers of poetry to come to terms with Duncan's art is shameful and lazy; as Duncan has said in “Roots and Branches”:
Foremost we admire the outlaw
who has the strength of his own lawfulness.
1968
A Chat with a Novelist
When I turned up Deep Creek Road the sheep bordered the cattle guard and their “ba ba ba bahhs” seemed to reflect the question: why would anyone live here? But I drove on through the Engleman spruce and withered sedge for a few miles, then turned when I saw BUSHWACK
PALACE branded into a rail fence with MCGUANE, PROP, below it. I drove another mile through a pasture of sudan grass, noticing the flattened rattlers with their clouds of flies on the road, a few conical piles of bear doodoo with even more flies and prairie falcons hovering in abstract gyres above the trail. Why not live here? I queried myself. When I drew up to the ranch which closely resembled the movie set from Shane Mr. McGuane's huge dog jumped bristling onto the car hood but her master's voice called and we walked through the darkened house to a yet darker study. I noticed Mr. McGuane looked a trifle old for his age which hasn't been determined though I would guess between the mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Like the redoubtable Pynchon he makes an unfortunate fetish out of privacy. Pourquoi? Who knows. Perhaps no one cares but that's not what we're talking about, is it? There was a two-gallon swiveled decanter of cheapish gin and some ice on his bare desk. Mrs. McGuane, née Portia Crockett, brought in a pewter platter of braised leeks and sweetbreads which we nibbled at with a chilled off-year Château Margaux. Mr. McGuane glowered as if this intrusion for the sake of contemporary letters was unwelcome. He put on Linda Rondstadt and Dolly Parton albums and sang along rather loudly with them, not well I might add. My questions punctuated this noise with some difficulty.
Interviewer:
Is it true what you said about Bob?
McGuane:
Nope.
Int:
You seem to key off the Midwest in your work. You were born and raised there but you commute between Montana and Key West without a nod to Michigan and its rich literary milieu. Why?
McGuane:
I have a genetic horror of the Midwest, a dark image of the past where Mortimer Snerd screwed three thousand times a day to build that heartland race.
Int:
Oh.
McGuane:
Yet I miss those piney woods, those beaver ponds and rivers, the feebs and dolts who run the bait shops and gas stations, the arc welders in the legislature, the ham with chicken gravy that poisoned me in Germfask when I fished the Driggs.
Int:
You're not denying your roots?
McGuane:
Cut that shit out.
Int:
A-OK. What do you think of the Drug Generation?
McGuane:
The Driggs is a fine river for brook trout.
Int:
Must I always be a wanderer between past and pillar, the virgin and the garrison, the noose and the cocktail lounge?
McGuane:
That's your bizness.
Int:
Who do you think is really good right now?
McGuane:
Grass. Hawkes. Landolfi. Cela.
Int:
Do you care to elaborate?
McGuane:
Nope.
Int:
Were it possible, how would you derive the novels you would like to write?
McGuane:
Cervantes, De Rojas, Rabelais, Swift, Fielding. Machado de Assis, Melville. Gogol, Joyce, Flann O'Brien. Ilf and Petrov, Peacock, Dickens, Kafka, Chesterton, Byron of the letters.
Int:
Do you think Nabokov excessively conumdramatic?
McGuane:
Is that like hydramatic?
Int:
You jest, mega-fop!
[A two-day interruption was made here to attend a Crow Indian powwow. The interviewer became very ill from semipoisonous tequila which he mistook for white table wine. The Custer Battlefield of Thomas Berger fame was visited. How life imitates art!]
Int:
Officially Montana is your residence, is it not?
McGuane:
Yes, the bleak cordillera of the Absaroka consoles me.
Int:
Why don't you live on one of America's marvel coasts?
McGuane:
I'm glad you asked. I've been to those places. And the Left there to which I belong was developing an attitude toward the people of the interior and the unfashionably pigmented poor that is best described as racist. For example, the Left implicitly considers any white born in the South to be congenitally evil.
Int:
What about the whole “novel scene” now?
McGuane:
Only that the serial preoccupations of fiction could be replaced by the looped, the circuited and the “Johnny Carson Show.” Even something so ductile as an eclaire has an inner dynamism not inferior to a hard-on or a terrified Norway rat.
Int:
I think most of our readers are unfamiliar with your interest in pastry.
McGuane:
It ends with eclaires and their analogue reality (or not).
Int:
I wonder how many of our readers realize that your aunt was the celebrated Irish novelist Flann O'Brien?
McGuane:
Very few.
Int:
What other things come to mind that our readers probably don't realize?
McGuane:
What is the name of your magazine?
Int:
Sumac, which unfortunately some think is French for stomach.
McGuane:
Well, one of the things that Stomach readers doubtless fail to realize is that D. H. Lawrence was Norman Douglas's wife. It was the first society function hazarded by the widely resented “surfboard aristocracy” of Tasmania, also I might add their first transvestite wedding.
Int:
Oh. One critic describes your fictions as being “laced with canals of meaning and symbolism.”
McGuane:
Yes, yes . . .
Int:
Is that true?
McGuane:
O yes, yes, yes . . . Why gee yes.
Int:
What do you think of, I think it was either Granville Hicks's or George Steiner's contention, that fiction should be spelled “fickshun?”
McGuane:
No.
Int.
What of your fabled love of animals?
McGuane:
I would handily commit 3300 acts of artistic capitulation to keep my dog in Purina.
Int:
Why have you never mentioned the Budweiser Clydesdales in your work?
McGuane:
O god, hasn't that been done to death?
Int:
May I ask for the first sentence of your new novel?
McGuane:
Of course. “Upstairs, Mona bayed for dong.”
Int:
MMMMmmm. How ironical. Yesterday in the local tackle shop I was told you had invented a new fly for trout.
McGuane:
Yes, I call it the Republican Indispensible. You tie it up out of pig bristles and carp feathers.
Int:
Have you ever caught Gila trout in New Mexico?
McGuane:
No.
Int:
Arizona?
McGuane:
O, not at all.
Int:
Are you offended by calling a large trout “Larry Lunker” as do many of our sporting writers?
McGuane:
Au contraire. The term frequently hangs on my lower lip like a figment of dawn.
Int:
Are you stoned?
McGuane:
No, intermittently never.
Int:
What constitutes a horse's ass in our literature?
McGuane:
A difficult question! I'd say 1. parsimony 2. surefire Babbitry 3. snorkeling 4. New York 5. San Francisco 6. Irving Berlin 7. this is your life not theirs 8. pick up sticks 9. Mary Jane and Sniffles 10. U.S.A. Meatland Parcels 11. a million baby kisses 12. a bad cold 13. corrasable bond.
[Mr. McGuane ran out in the rain to install a new starter solenoid in his Porsche 911T, We then left immediately for the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana to see the birthplace of James Welch. We were there for three days. Mr McGuane unfortunately mistook tequila for a widely known ginger ale, hence spent much time yodeling in the thundermug as the Irish would
put it.]
Int:
I'm interested in what you think of Barton Midwood's contention that the modern novelist has lost his audience. They've all gone to the beach.
McGuane:
Hopelessly true. We're lucky if they've gone no farther than the beach. If they were at the beach a year ago when Midwood made the statement they are surely in Tibet by now.
Int:
What is the last book you didn't write?
McGuane:
The Possums of Everest.
Int:
I understand you were working on a contemporary western but have abandoned it?
McGuane:
Yes, the book was centered in Big Pie Country or Big Fly Country, whatever you will. The title was Ghost Riff-Raff in the Sky.
Int:
Why did you give up the title Wandell's Opprobrium?
McGuane:
It would have sent everybody to a Tibetan beach.
Int:
Don't you think the title should have been Walkie Talkie?
McGuane:
Not at all.
Int:
Your politics, rather the lack of them, is a point of interest to some critics. Do you have a comment?
McGuane:
I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America has become a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.
Int:
Do you feel lionized?
McGuane:
I feel vermiculized.
Int:
Do you have any deeply felt interest in poetry?
McGuane:
O, a great deal. So much in fart that I find myself overwhelmed. I would like to add this: for decades the Pruniers’ restaurants have had the reputation of being the best seafood restaurants in the world.
Int:
What of your college years?
McGuane:
I graduated from Black Pumpkin in 1956. Since then, I might add, our Pumpkin group has dominated American letters.
Int:
What about the underground?
McGuane:
What about the underground?
Int:
I mean, what about the Underground?
McGuane:
Oh. The Underground has become the overground, in essence a parable of the Gay Caballero.
Int:
Is that in the same genre as the Spanish Cavalier?
McGuane:
