Another vast curricular discourse from Ron Silliman, the Great Expatiator, makes me want to talk back, which I haven't felt like doing in a long time.

With Ron there is always this immense unexplored poetry turf, just waiting there, underneath the Quietude shrubbery, waiting for the Next Generation of Too Many Poets who Don't Know Enough. It's a curriculum for becoming Informed, in order to Know What Is Going On.

I think I come from a cultural background which is sort of midwestern-stoic, a culture which emphasizes understatement & brevity (believe it or not - & it may be hard to believe, considering the giant Blather-Bank which is HG Poetics). Say what you have to say, no more no less. Keep it brief.

This culture offers, in many ways, an inimical environment for the audacious flora which is Poetry. Yet it has its points. It produces great terse quiet writers like Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson.

I think much beautiful art arises out of nostalgia for an imagined, remembered, childhood-fostered unity of culture. The reactionary tendencies of TS Eliot or Pound draw on it, but other arty characters, like Proust, for example, draw on it too. What is it, exactly? Montale points toward what I'm thinking about with his notions of "dilettantism" and "the second life of art." A certain vivid graceful place where art and life mutually enhance each other, without a lot of explanatory Cliff Notes.

My notion of midwestern understatement seems to chime with this other concept; that is, art makes itself manifest & speaks of and for those who really need it. It's a kind of (pseudo? super?) natural phenomenon, which in some sense renders anxieties about readership or transmission or canonicity or whatever - all these "middleman" issues - truly academic.

I'm sure I can be accused now of anti-intellectualism & know-nothingism. OK. But I believe art gets made by those with the talent to make it, out of their need to make it; and it is discovered & enjoyed by those who really need to discover it; and that this process begins not in grad school or even high school but in childhood - it's transmitted by the people who read & sing songs & tell stories to their children. I also don't think it's managed or controlled by intellectuals & academics, because the process of making and responding to art and poetry operates on its own level between producers and receivers.

I'm probably not expressing at all what I set out to try to express. I'm thinking of the place of poetry in life as something different, humbler, from that imagined by its intellectual supervisors in the academies & the publishing houses & outlaw-wannabee subcultures. Not that it's anti-intellectual, not at all : but it's a place, a sphere of activities, which is simply maintained (unsystematically, freely, adventitiously), in shared fashion, by those who know it & love it.

Everything can be explained, probably, by Nebraska. "The plainness of the plains." [Mandelstam] A different landscape of emotional perception offered by small Midwestern towns & farms - different from the jazzy coasts, or the steamy South. The near & the far, the vast & the small, interpenetrate. Time slows down. Childhood is another country.

Kees was an only child, maybe a happy one. Some of the bitterness could stem from exorcised nostalgia. Look at this poem:

1926

 
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking.  Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

 
An orange moon.  I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

 
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon.  Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Milton & Doris were movie stars of the time. Childhood another country. How doesn't this terse, somber poem shed a certain slant on the art & life of Frank O'Hara? (& on Tate, Ashbery, & all the permanent children of American poetry? Myself included!)

Interesting new book crossed my desk today:

Of Poems & Their Antecedents, by Sherry Brennan (Subpress)

too tired from last night to read it right now. Big book, over 600 pp. landscape, botany, natural history, midwest rustbelt archaeology. quiet sound, looking, looking, rain, distance, quiet. rough drafts included, sketches, etc.

some very old old quatrains from little HG :

My countrymen, dreaming and drinking down
the livelong day in your smooth Cadillacs,
Americans made of nostalgia, playing the clown
on roads past the high school railroad tracks -

 
go on, play the radio, shoot for the moon;
your little boy up from grasslands not for hire
is building a tricycle in the backyard, and soon
he'll step inside a brand new chariot of fire.

[my father being a patent lawyer (& someone still fascinated with games & gizmos), I grew up in an atmosphere in which inventions were important. I remember my brothers and I (1960 or so) floating the first prototype of the "frisbee" around the yard.]

Across my desk : Lorine Niedecker : Paean To Place (Woodland Pattern/Light & Dust, 2003). Autograph edition published in celebration of poet's 100th birthday. Nice, very nice pictures on cover. The poems printed in (her) handwriting : restful to screen-toss'd eyes. Edited by Cid Corman, afterword by Karl Young.

(& I happen to know the place she's talking about, that's nice too.)

And for me, beneath all the archaeology & romance-disaster & sedimentation of Providence, lies another layer altogether, much deeper, sadder, distant, out in the midwest.