Going through some old books and papers from my library stored in boxes in an American attic, I came across a copy of Howard Nemerov’s The Western Approaches, which I purchased while attending the Breadloaf Writers Conference in the summer of 1978. Nemerov had just won the National Book Award for his Collected Poems and I remember him, dressed in shorts and wearing a light blue jacket, investigating the trees, naming the birds, and generally enjoying the fine Vermont weather with his wife and kids.

Given the choice to study with William Pack, Linda Pastan, a rather serious woman by the name of Voigt, Stanley Plumley, and Marvin Bell, I chose Nemerov. Interestingly enough, the list of those who wished to study with this poet was shorter than the others. I wondered why.

I soon found out. I placed my best manuscripts in Nemerov’s folder and excitedly waited for the first day of class. When it came, Howard Nemerov stalked into the room and announced to everyone that none of us were poets. In fact, he said, he’d found nothing that resembled a poem in the manuscripts he’d received. He then read examples of what he considered to be some of the worst lines he had ever encountered, and this correspondent’s was among them! I was devastated. Yet I could not but be fascinated by this man’s manner–his lively mind–he was the most intelligent, the most cultured person, I had met up to that time–and still remains one of the most impressive–and by the fact that his hands seemed to be doing a little shaking dance all on their own, while he attempted to drink his morning coffee.

While attempting this task, Nemerov began his off-the-cuff lecture–the first of many delivered formally, and informally to eager listeners in and around the grounds of Breadloaf and the Breadloaf Inn. “What about Hart Crane?” I asked him. “Oh, I used to be quite excited by Crane as a young man, and would recite him while shaving in the morning,” said Howard Nemerov, with a wistful smile. “I don’t see so much in his work anymore,” he concluded with the manner of someone who has woken up from a dream of some sort–of someone who has outgrown a bauble. Nemerov’s voice was deep, and resonant. I still have it on a CD of his reading “The Goose Fish,” I believe–but it’s not as impressive as I remember it.

That summer I met my good friend Gordon Ferguson when he also was an aspiring young poet just fresh from Lew Turco’s classes at Oswego. He and I both formed the Breadloaf Howard Nemerov fan club. In the evenings we discussed what he told us and tried to apply it to our own poetic efforts, humble as they were. In the midst of all the craziness–the mutual ego-stroking, the scramble for notice, the march of the neo-beats, the Sylvia Plath look-alikes, the silly surrealists, the cocktail sippers and tennis players who afterwards showed up on the arms–or it was rumored–in the beds of some of the stars of the conference that summer–Nemerov’s was the voice of reason, humble, self-effacing, but powerful.

Here are a few of the notes I scribbled in the front of that book those many years ago.

Nemerov said:

1) That the recounting of your dreams day after day is boring. It’s boring when you tell them to someone, and especially boring in a poem.

2) Tell about his reading the contrived image of a man with no hands reading the book of his life while the leaves are blown by the wind.

3) Poetry is elevated speech.

4) Inversions are o.k. if they are used sparingly and enhance the lines.

5) Abstract words about life are o.k. too–Try to go without using abstractions in your speech and see how difficult it is.

6) Strive for an impersonal voice. There are too many craftless poems that use either sex, dreams, or the moon as their excuse for “deep” meaning.

7) Tell of the “Family Gothic” poem in which the poet (usually a woman) gives us the terrible, dream-like low-down on their lives.

8) Poetry has to do with real things as they are. The other stuff is just so much escapism.

9) Nemerov said that he couldn’t understand why poets could not plainly say what they had to say.

10) When you read or hear poetry you can feel the rightness of the lines, their beauty–while with the other stuff you can sense the clap-trap. Poetry provides its own test.

11) It took people like Virgil, Blake, Donne, Shakespeare, thousands of years to get us above the belly, the cock, the cunt, and the asshole–now certain of these new poets are trying to drag us back to that level again.

12) Anyone can publish anything in the Shithouse review–and there are many of them–too many.

13) Tell of Nemerov’s true opinion of the talents of Pack, Bell, Plumley, Voigt, etc.

14) “Work. Don’t let anyone interfere with that. Just do it without regard for literary fads, and given time, you may or may not get your reward.”

15) “I was for many years underestimated. Now I’m overestimated.”

16) “Develop craft–this, with observations of the life around you, might result in a poem.”

17) “Write dignified poems. Poems that cause the reader to feel 10 feet tall after reading them.”

I’d like to end with a wonderful poem by Nemerov about Dante published in the same book in which I took my notes.

Aftermath

When he had carried to term the sacred poem
That for so many years had starved him lean,
What in the world was left for him to do
In the world but wait there, in the world?

Now see him coming down Can Grande’s stair
To eat Can Grande’s bread, the wasted man
Who has been through Hell and seen what was to see,
And been through Heaven and seen what was to see.

And now is waiting for what is to be
Again, the second death although of bliss
Assured with his immortal girl restored–
Like Lazarus, save in his being saved.

The world is what it was: though Boniface
Is dead, so is the Savior-Emporer
(of typhoid, at Trier, all those years ago);
The world is what it always is; the Po

Is still a filthy ditch along whose banks
A populace of hogs, curs, wolves, pursues
Destruction as it did; nothing has changed,
The sacred poem is done, that heaven and earth

Had put their hands to, and like one lost he waits
Among the lost, musing sometimes on Virgil
In Limbo, and, though of bliss at last assured,
On how the Terrace of the Proud awaits

The painful penitent stooped under his stone.
Of all this, one imagines, he says nothing,
The man that mothers frighten children with:
“Be good, or he’ll haul you back with him to Hell.”

I notice, scribbled in my book that “Nemerov and [Stanley] Elkin were the real thing.” Looking back on that fine summer in Vermont, I also recall a good conversation with John Gardner.

Spiritual Necessity; Selected Poems of Frank Samperi.
Edited by John Martone.
Station Hill Press.
Paperback. 171 pgs.

Back in the 1980’s we used to puzzle over Frank Samperi’s gorgeous books. They were beautifully done, with large, high-rag-content papers framing triple-spaced, minimal poems, tiny sequences that resembled haiku, and dense, thundering sections of theological and philosophical speculations. The books never sold. In fact, we found several in a remainder bin in a Milwaukee bookstore, still gleaming, still perfect.

This book brings those sequences to us in a more homely, but much more convenient package for an affordable price. We are spared much of the theological and philosophical thunder, the maunderings of the “deep mind” of the poet who numbered Aristotle, Aquinas, Shankara and–above all(according to Robert Kelly’s Preface)–Dante–among his masters. Instead, we are given the best part of Samperi–the artist–free of most of the white space that was such a presence in the earlier editions. But before considering Samperi at his best, let’s take a look at one or two of those philosophical apercus that editor Martone includes.

Here’s one on pg. 32:

“To be drawn into the market only intensifies one’s sense of the ambience that impedes; therefore, any science that pretends to have discovered a means to a re-establishment of the natural has, in truth, simply proposed to the mind an end that places the whole populace in a position conducive toward complete service to the State.” This, gentle readers, is not taken out of a larger context, but is presented as one among several aphorisms, al la Lichtenberg or Goethe. And how does the latter part of this statement of “truth” follow the former, although the sentence is neatly balanced on that oh so logical apparatus of “therefore”? In fact, we could uncouple the first part of the statement, delete the therefore, and still have a statement that appears to reveal an important truth, which in fact, remains ill-defined, cryptic, scrambled.

Here’s another on the same page: “Blake never released himself from Homer–that is, his battlefield is the Homeric plain.” Anyone familiar with Blake can find scores of examples to counter this oracular pronouncement. We might say the same thing about Milton, because Milton wrote epics and included epic catalogues in his Paradise Lost. We could substitute Milton for Homer in Samperi’s statement and be just as insightful, perhaps even more so.

These are the “truths” of a man who had retired from the world of letters–as he says in another note;–one who had few friends to question his pronouncements, to put his thinking in perspective, to send him to the library with suggestions for further reading.

He gives us a glimpse of himself in a tiny poem:

sitting at a back table
in an automat
my glasses off.

This humble man in a humble context is the Frank Samperi that makes this selected poems catch fire.

Here’s another poem:

A crowd
stood

in front
of

the church
gap-

ing as
four

pallbear-
ers

carried
the

coffin
down

the steps
to

the hearse
as

the grieved
chil-

dren of
the

deceased
were

singly
es-

corted
to

the fam-
i-

ly car–

after
when

the last
car

was seen
slow-

ly turn
ing

around
the

corner
they

went their
way.

Or another picture, worthy of Edward Steichen:

the
trains

shaking
the
dust

from
the
El

scatter
the
birds

from
the
trees

to
the
roofs.

This is all wonderful writing: pictures drawn with care of a city where Samperi wondered, alone, an orphan, but a keen observer of others: a bona-fide Objectivist, although he was never a formal member of the group. Where, though, in all of this plain language is the much spoken of Dante? We see William Carlos Williams, but we see nothing of the range, the sweep, the virtuosity in thought and in language, and the humor–the crazy humor,–of the man who would cause an antediluvian giant–Nimrod–to spout forth baby talk. (Frank Samperi never laughs in his poetry.) Where, too, is Dante’s hallucinagenic imagination that allows him to build a world of moaning humans and a windmill-like Satan with triple faces? (Samperi only sticks to descriptions of the real using 5 and 10 cent words.) This is a real puzzle to me, as Cid Corman made similar claims for his own writing before he passed on. His work was greater than Dante’s he proclaimed, though one could see no resemblance between El Cid’s minimalism with the great writer’s terza rima.

Be that as it may, taken on his own terms, and leaving out the theology and the philosophical insights, (which strike this reviewer as questionable at best), Frank Samperi’s poems are fine. One could go on and on quoting wonderful lines, pointing at glittering examples, and gem-like images, but we will cease. If there is a weakness in the work, Frank Samperi beats us to the punch to point it out. He gives a concise self-critique on page 61:

how far can we go
in our descent
toward particulars
not far
our language
mathematical
or otherwise
just reaps surfaces.

This is a great book to have on the shelf. John Martone is a deft editor and should be congratulated on his work, and Station Hill Press should be commended on bringing these sequences back into print.

If we can imagine our consideration of Another South as a kind of scrambling progress up the side of the Mount Parnassus of Southern Experimental Writing, with writing at degree zero well below us and one sad attempt at performance art in the shadows just behind our heels, then the next stop has to be the ledge of ironic narratives, where we’ll stop to rest a while.

These are “learned” poems, in the sense that they make reference to the icons of our common culture: Wittgenstein, Borges, Spicer, etc., and they are “with it”–in that every reference is set forth with a hefty amount of irony. In this sense they appear to be meditations, as in the old metaphysical writers, but lack the requisite dialectic. Moreover, they are open field compositions, mightily influenced by Olson and the Black Mountain “further” crowd, as in this stanza from “Economics of Metonymy: sic transit,” by Skip Fox:

Matrix of vein in leaf, in leaves, surge and resurgent, forth and
back, as rivers flow forward, yet turning, ever seek their
source, like the heart, its founding waters. Pathetic and
lovely to watch a man discover his own mortality. Winds
die into breezes, breezes along walls where he wakes,
alone. A strut loose in his eyes, the hemorrhage of referents,
recognition, he knows, as do few, the utter truth. Darkness
beneath the sky, or beyond in summer, the infinite rising
and passing away which itself neither rises nor passes. Last
night I dreamed of a communal bathroom for the faculty,
sweating shithole in lounge [sic] filled with people you wish
you didn’t know and where there were also baskets
of chocolate, fragrant, amelt. Promises, promises.

This passage is typical of Skip’s generous selection in Another South. The stanza itself is a kind of “pile” of references. The first six lines appear to cohere and read as sentimental, almost maudlin, except for the startling “strut loose in his eyes,” but even this is carefully counter-balanced by the heavy-handed “hemorrhage of referents.” Yet another line of mock-poetry, and then we come to the utlimate self-puncturing irony of ironies that deflates the sentiment of the earlier lines.

The “sic transit” section describes a Kingfisher (I wonder whose?), egrets, cicadas and a dragonfly in natural surrounds in language that almost glows in comparison with the earlier stanzas of this poem. We even learned that a cardinal can “chort”!

Inflating and deflating; creating and puncturing, while running off in a thousand associative directions so that the references multiply to the extent that they almost cancel each other out–this is Skip’s agglutinative process. His piles are not pretty writing to the ear nor are they subtle writing to the mind, but they work.

Bill Lavender appears to agree. His “A Note to Skip on Max and Maxine” could have been written by Skip Fox. On the other hand, “from pentacl” is fashioned from the multi-purpose material we wrote of in earlier postings.

A third practicioner of “ironic narrative” is Christy Sheffield Sanford She’s represented in these pages with a single long poem called “Rachel’s Recovery (Fucking with the Angels)” which I do not have the energy to consider at the moment.

High above us–on the Mount Parnassus of the South–Thomas Holley Chivers is smiling and waving us up.

To be continued.

The creation and use of AUPC offers no risk, no challenge. One doesn’t have to live, to suffer, to grow, to die, to manufacture it. It can be generated by text-chopping programs available to all at places like the Burning Press website, as Jim Lefwich indicated to me in passing several years back. (I did not verify the veracity of his words.) One doesn’t have to live in the South to cut, knead, roll, or process it into little white loaves. But one can publish it. There’s a community that does something with it. (Though I doubt if they have the patience to read books of such stuff through to the end.) Skip Fox uses AUPC in certain poems in this anthology (more of Skip later), and Sandy Baldwin’s “[basic system code]” and her “Creatures from Resulting Simulation world:” is identified, helpfully, as “Output by Framsticks simulator.”

How does one escape from this writing degree zero business? This tissue of five or ten cent blenderized words strung together and printed double, single, or triple-spaced on the page? Surely the addition of the human element will help? What about that old business of the meter-making argument given us by Emerson? Or perhaps the introduction of narrative–of story-telling–of HUMAN PRESENCE?

The absolute nadir of Another South has to be just such an attempt. “Asleeping; a kind of redevous” by John Lowther is a “conversation poem” of the type pioneered by David Antin. However, where David Antin succeeds, often brilliantly, in the use of narrative to illuminate the processes of the poetic text while in the midst of its creation, the blind-folded Lowther gives us incoherent gabble. To drive home the point that this is all “experimental” there’s a photograph of Lowther blind-folded–a pale, bald-headed fellow with a Van-Dyke beard–who transcribes your in the clouds of text as “yr” and I as “i.” We see Lowther referring to poetry once in a while, but then he drifts off into one insignificant subject after another. I’ll try to reproduce some of the text below, though this blog won’t allow me to insert the many gaps:

this allowed me certain freedoms that other kids didnt have and so standing there we said well fuck it you know this line is really long so we went out we got in my car we drove away over and over this happened quite literally i mean you understand?

We do, unfortunately. We had to have been there, to get it, right, Mr. Lowther? Of course we understand the rationale behind including performance art in an anthology of poetry, but why this particular example? Surely there must have been something a bit more challenging in the experimental South? Mr. Lowther’s text is so tame. It’s as if no one ever heard of Chris Burden, or the numerous “in your face” texts generated by the High Performance crowd twenty years ago.

To be continued.