Silliman’s Blog

David Meltzer 1937 - 2016

Here is a note I wrote on David's work here in 2005.

Ive written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give The New American Poetry a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part and its not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allens S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protg. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason & James Broughton & even tho its a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasnt actively channeling Robinson Jeffers Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard & Bruce Boyd whom its harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the books initial publication, as theyve become its least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were.

Given that he was improvising & fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, its curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting & useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didnt fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic one could probably put Duerden & Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder & Whalen in Allens curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail Dusenberry & a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, OHara or even Creeley. This mode lets call it New Western perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim Kollers Coyotes Journal during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats & Olsons vision of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing & by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.

Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, its odd that Meltzer hasnt become much more widely known, celebrated before this. Davids Copy is at least the fourth selected poems hes published, the others being Tens, Arrows & The Name, and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes mostly those by Charles Bukowski widely distributed through the big book chains.

Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. Its not that there were no Jews among the New Americans Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Eigner all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry & the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsbergs writing. Indeed, I wouldnt be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didnt really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans & language poetry.

Finally, Meltzer and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or OHara et al lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzers age, like Michael McClure. Meltzers work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. Its not that Meltzer lacked the chops & more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzers situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle like poets in New York who were visibly not NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves in opposition even to poets whose work they cherished.

Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzers work, its that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from Hollywood Poems, its accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:

De Chirico without Cheracol saw space where its dead echo opened up a plain unbroken by the dancers. Instead a relic supermarket nobody shops at. Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath a Keinholz table whose top is blue with Shirley Temples saucers, pitchers. Mickey Mouse wind-up dolls in rows like Detroit. All tilt out of the running without electricity. Veils of history, garments worn in movies, hung on steel racks at Costume R.K.O. R. Karo wouldve used the towers light. Hed wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.

So dense with details that it rides like a list (& sounds like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashberys poetry. Davids Copy is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read.

One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect thats because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography & a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer & an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:

Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called The History of Everything. It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world. Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, nonpractitioners & nonseekers.

Paul Blackburn and Me

Edie Jarolim

Its been thirty years since I finished editing the Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn. I still cant quit him.

Paul Blackburn died on September 13, 1971 exactly forty-five years ago today. He was forty-four. I never met him, but I spent more than half a decade with him, writing my dissertation and editing his collected and selected poems. When I started this three-pronged project, it seemed to me that Blackburn had lived a reasonably long life. By the time I finished, I thought hed died tragically young.

***

I first encountered Blackburn in the late 1970s through M.L. Rosenthal, whose Yeats seminar I had taken as a grad student at NYU. Id been contemplating writing a thesis about one of the confessional poets, Rosenthals specialty, but when I went in to talk to him about possible dissertation subjects, Rosenthal said, What do you think about Paul Blackburn?

I hadnt thought about him at all. Id never heard of him. Rosenthal explained, Blackburns widow asked me to edit his collected poems. I dont have the time but I told her I would pass the job along to a qualified graduate student. He added, If you do the scholarly edition for your dissertation, youll end up with a published book when you get your Ph.D.

I got hold of The Cities, the book Rosenthal had recommended as quintessential Blackburn. Many of the poems were about the BMT subway line, which Id grown up riding in Brooklyn. I admired Blackburns technical skill, his musical score-like notations of the works, his ability to make the writing look easy. I shoved down my doubts about his attitudes towards women. A published book... Now there was a shiny object for an aspiring academic.

The project turned out to be far more complex than Id anticipated. First, I had to come up with a criterion for inclusion in the edition. I opted for poems that had been previously published. But what constituted publication? A lot of Blackburn poems appeared only in mimeographed editions. Should those be included?

I next had to decide on an organization. Should the poems appear in the same groupings as the published volumes? There was too much overlap, and many poems were published in poetry journals but not books.

My choice of a chronological arrangement led to other questions: Should the date be based on the first draft of the poem or the published version? And how would I determine the first draft date? And if Blackburn revised the poem after it was published, which version should I use?

I became a poetry detective, interviewing ex-wives and friends, identifying typewriters, tracking down biographical clues in the poems (luckily there were a lot of those). The process was fascinating, but time consuming. It didnt help my efficiency that I was commuting between New York and San Diego, where Blackburns widow, Joan, had sold his papers to UCSDs Archive for New Poetry.

San Diego now there was another shiny object. A typical Easterner, I went there expecting to find a smaller version of Los Angles. The freeways were there, and also some of the congestion, but so was a seascape of surprisingly pristine beauty, and a string of coastal cities, each with their own distinct character. USCD resided in the poshest and probably most stunning of them all, La Jolla.

I was hired to catalogue Blackburns archive and thus was often on the scene for the groundbreaking reading series created by poet Michael Davidson, the Archive for New Poetrys director. I became part of the inner circle of the graduate students and young academics in the UCSD literature department. I also got friendly with the local writers in town (Rae Armantrout and Jerome Rothenberg, for example), as well as visiting writers like Lydia Davis and Ron Silliman. By no means was this project all work and no play.

I never quite pinned down how I felt about Blackburns poetry, but after a while it didnt matter. The editing was an end in itself and Paul Blackburn was part of my life, day and night. He haunted my dreams. Sometimes the scenarios were sexual, sometimes as everyday as my kitchen cabinets. Kind of like his poetry.

Finally, I had a scholarly edition of 623 poems. For each, I detailed the decisions that went into the editing and dating. I added a critical introduction of maybe 50 pages, discussing Blackburns biography and his place in the poetry pantheon as well as the editing theory.

Seemed like a wrap to me.

The powers that be at NYU disagreed. Now that his oeuvre had been established by me! they argued that I had a basis for a real dissertation, a 200-page critical introduction about Blackburn himself, rather than about the editing process. Who says irony is dead?

When I finished this next Sisyphean task, I brought eight volumes into the office of the recorder at NYU. She said, Youre only supposed to bring in two copies of your dissertation.

That is two copies, I said.

Id had it with academia by then. It wasnt just the hoops Id had to jump through at NYU. By the time I took my qualifying exams, my prose style had been pulverized; I had the sentence structure of Henry James and the verbal clarity of Yogi Berra. A decade earlier, I was writing college papers praised for their lucidity. Next thing I knew, I was submitting a proposal for a dissertation titled From Apocalypse to Entropy: An Eschatological Study of the American Novel. I switched thesis topics and advisors but didnt kick the jargon and passive construction habits.

Which was a problem, because what I really wanted to be was a writer, not a literary critic.

My not so-brilliant career plan had been to get tenure and then, in my spare time, devote myself to my craft, in whatever genre that turned out to be. Being a teaching assistant at NYU had cured me of any desire to teach, which I realized would be the main part of my job description. And that published book that was going to help me secure my place in academia? It wasnt going to do the trick or even come close. Paul Blackburn, I now understood, was a dead white guy, academia-speak for someone representing the establishment. My untrendy specialty would consign me to the boonies before I couldmaybe, possibly, who knows? snag a job in a decent city.

Nor did I want to give up my Greenwich Village apartment.

I grew up in Brooklyn and had finally acquired what every bridge-and-tunnel brat aspired to in the days before the boroughs became hip: a rent-stabilized place in Manhattan. Call me crazy, but I didnt want to move someplace I didnt want to live to do something I didnt want to do.

I helped with the publication of the Collected Poems by Persea Press in 1985. I tackled the Selected Poems next. Somewhere in between there were small Blackburn books The Parallel Voyages, The Lost Journals and a few journal articles.

Slowly but surely I opted out of my role as the keeper of the Blackburn flame, handmaiden to his reputation and as a potential academic.

First, I happened into a job as a guidebook editor at the travel division of Simon and Schuster. It took two more travel publishing jobs and a move to Tucson in 1992 to finally jumpstart my long-delayed writing career. This time, I had fewer qualms about leaving New York.

***

My retreat from all things Blackburn continued until 9/11. My niece had phoned from San Antonio to make sure I was okay; though I was living in Tucson, I often visited New York and my old digs in lower Manhattan.

Talk about wake up calls. Suppose I were to die suddenly and intestate? I was divorced, had no children, and my parents were no longer alive. Everything would have gone by default to my older sister, from whom I was estranged. I didnt have much of an estate, except my literal estate. I loved the swirled stucco home near the University of Arizona that I had bought for a song and I still loved literature. I decided to will my house to the UAs excellent Poetry Center, where it would be a residence for visiting writers. It would be named for Paul Blackburn.

One day, maybe two years ago, a friend tagged me on Facebook to join a poetry discussion about Paul Blackburn. It was like attending my own funeral. One of the participants wondered what had happened to me. Another chimed in, authoritatively, that I had become a professional dog person. Clearly, my dog blog had better SEO than my genealogy blog.

This public erasure of my career between the Blackburn years and the publication of my dog book was one of the many things that inspired me to finish a memoir that had been on the back burner for about a decade, called Getting Naked for Money. Traditional publishing had by now hit the skids and I wanted more control over my work and, especially, over my royalties. I started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to publish it myself.

It was through that campaign and reconnecting with old friends from my poetry past that I discovered there had been a combined celebration of the digitizing of Paul Blackburns archive at UCSD/surprise retirement party for Michael Davidsonto which I hadnt been invited. Well, fuck. Now even that accomplishment had been erased.

I thought about my bequest to the UA. Why was I still holding on to any connection to Paul Blackburn? Others around me had clearly moved on, abnegating my role. I still wanted to will my house to the university as a writers residence, but now, I decided, it would be reserved for women over 50 writing in any genre. Women that the world tended to ignore, in spite of the good work they were doing.

I contacted the UA and said Id like to change the terms of my bequest.

This was about a month ago. Heres where the story gets really weird.

At around the same time, I had dinner with a woman whose acquaintance I had made earlier this year at a Seder, another single ex-New Yorker. I started telling her about changing my bequest to the UA. She interrupted me mid-sentence. Did you say Paul Blackburn? she practically shouted.

Yes, I said, Paul Blackburn. I thought she was confused. Blackburn had always been a poets poet. In my experience, the publication of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems hadnt done much to widen his reputation.

She knew exactly whom I meant. Paul Blackburn had been her first lover. She had been 17; he had been in his mid-thirties and married to his second wife, Sara. They saw each other for about a year. She eventually left New York and married someone else but always thought, somehow, that Paul would turn up in her town, maybe to give a reading. She was shocked to learn that he died, about a year after the fact.

She sent me pictures that she and Paul had taken in a photo booth, he preserved in amber with a little goatee, she in a fresh-faced youthful incarnation that was equally mythical to me.

I wasnt surprised at the revelation of the affair; his poetry had always hinted at infidelities. I was saddened because Id liked Sara Blackburn the few brief times Id met her, but I was hardly one to judge. Mostly, I was appalled at the age and power difference. As my friend said, if it was today, he might have been charged with statutory rape by her parents.

I felt like I was in a weird time loop, doomed to relive a past that was no longer relevant to my present over and over.

And, I figured, if you cant escape your past, you can share your version of it with a little help from your friends.

Labels: Edie Jarolim, Paul Blackburn

Read the original here:
Silliman's Blog