American lines
Donald Davie
The Maximus Poems: Volume Three. Charles Olson. Edited by Charles Boer and George Butterick (Grossman 88.95),
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. John Ashbery (Viking Press, $5.95).
Charles Olson was an exceptionally generous and magnanimous man. And the chief pleasure of the posthumous third volume of his Maximus Poems — the first came in 1960, the second in 1968 — is in seeing that his untimely death at sixty was not quite so cruelly untimely as We had feared; at least, before he died, the Poetic project to which he'd vowed himself was terminated, was concluded — not merely cut short, unresolved. Halfway through this volume he defines the object aimed at:
Half Moon beach ("the arms of her") My balls rich as Buddha's sitting in her like the Padma — and Gloucester, foreshortened in front of me. It is not I, even if the life appeared biographical. The only interesting thing IS if one can be an image of men, "The nobleness, and the arete."
And before the end there are poems which exult sedately at having achieved this state, in which the Poet's chosen place, Gloucester, on the Massachusetts coast, is apprehended as a vital. 1-starn of all terrains whatever, and his
Vital Occupancy occupancy of it as embodying the one worthy and noble relation of Man with Earth and Ocean.
What's notable is that this project is only in an extended sense a poetic project at alt. The end it aims at is not the composition of a poem Or a body of poems, but the attainment of a state — of mind, one is tempted to say, though that would be wrong. (For "balls" is not metaphorical, and it is the physical occupancy of the site that is insisted on.) Because this extended sense of "poetic" is nowadays almost entirely strange to the countrymen of Wordsworth (to name just one English poet for whom the extended sense was the habitual one), The Maximus Poems cannot be recommended to English readers; and in fact, whereas the first two volumes were published here, it looks ,as if this third one won't be. Moreover, 't's true that in The Maximus Poems, as not in Wordsworth's Prelude nor in Pound's Canto, we can find what is poetic "3, nly if we agree not to look for the poetic to its restricted sense, where principles like elegance and economy come into Play. For my part I am more alarmed by readers who will strike this bargain than by }lase who can't or won't. I can't myself; and this Means that The Maximus Poems are, I find with dismay, much more fun to talk about than heY are to read. For in the first two volumes "ardlY more than in this one, which the author could not pass for the press, is there to be found a Page which is not disfigured by solecisms or Pointless ellipses and snarls, alike in syntax, Punctuation, diction, and lineation.
,The truth is—or part of it is—that Olson, o did not embark upon poetry until he was Middle_aged, is from the first, and throughout, racing to catch up on the patient apprenticeship that he never had. And yet this is not the only reason for the impression that we get from every page, of something written at breakneck speed, urgently, against the clock. For the same impression, though mediated in a very different way, comes to us from an American poet so different from Olson as John Ashbery, Ashbery, one imagines, has little good to say of Olson; and certainly the admirers of the one do not admire the other — which shows, if nothing else, how wide a range of attitudes the current American avant-garde comprehends. And yet they have something in common which perhaps only a non-American eye can detect, meaning by that something better than that tired condescension towards America' as "a young nation," or what Ashbery amusingly punctures: And please no talk of openness. I would pick Francis Thompson over Bret Harte Any day, if I had to.
Either I've been getting cleverer (or more patient), or else John Ashbery has learned to be clearer. One way or the other, from a poet who was totally opaque to me he has lately become one who is — intermittently indeed, but piercingly — transparent. And in his new collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, I have the illusion of understanding every other poem — which, on a first reading of a book that is both ambitious and idiosyncratic, is as much as one can ask for. Elegant, he certainly is; indeed in the past, and sometimes even now, an excessive elegance of a rather preening sort is what has betrayed him into culpable obscurities. On his pages the last thing we find is anything like Olson's defiant disarray of syntax and punctuation. But economy, that other concomitant of poetry narrowly considered — that one is less sure of finding. He certainly doesn't sprawl, as Olson does; but he does ''run
on." His long title-poem, for instance, though it draws finely to a convincing and moving close, has a build-up that is very leisurely indeed, positively prosey,
And Ashbery in poem after poem explains, for those who will listen, why at his infinitely slower tempo he is writing against the clock just as Olson is. For Ashbery's subject is, we might say, the importance and the pathos of the marginal, or (not quite the same thing) the significance of the random. "What is this life," asked W. H. Davies, "if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?" And what is it like, Ashbery retorts, if we do so stand? He answers that life then becomes suffused with wistfulness — for the loose ends, the things seen out of the corner of the eye, above all for the poems, presenting themselves each minute, which, slow down as much as we may into a deliberate idleness, still escape us, still "get away." The implicit assumption is — and here's the common ground with Olson — the Wordsworthian assumption or contention that "the poetic" is not a way of writing, but a way of living and attending to living. And if that is so, what excuse has the poet for not being a poet every minute? Hence, in Olson and Ashbery alike, the necessity — once the poetic engine has been started — to keep it ticking over, not picking and choosing among the moments that present themselves, but consuming them one and all, burning them as fuel for the enterprise that, once started, must at all costs be kept going. In neither of them is it, as English readers will too readily suppose, a vulgarly Romantic trust in the instantaneous, the spontaneous; it is a belief in the poetic as process rather than product, in poetry as something coterminous with lived actuality, not rescued or salvaged from it. It is because such high claims for poetry are laughed out of court in England, that Ashbery's new collection hasn't found a British publisher any more than his earlier collections have. The loss is ours.
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