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:: The Cannon

Political/Social Demonstration of the Time of Writing

The role of poetry in society is a secret doctrine—One is the visitor, yet the man reading first takes up most of the time. At a reception following the reading, a student engaging one, says, “It seems to me your work is like Gertrude Stein.” The man, one’s reading partner, immediately inserts himself and says, “Gertrude Stein. Certainly not! Gertrude Stein is the human mind—she [oneself] is merely human nature. [Reading of] someone dying of AIDS!” he scoffs, “Her writing is human nature, not the human mind,” he instructs the student. At a reading with him a few days later, he insists that he will go first and “read for a very long time!”

Any interpretation or reference to this instance is merely experience/anecdotal, it is of human nature—therefore impermanent.

“As, one example, Godard’s ‘The immediate is chance. At the same time it is definitive. What I want is the definitive by chance.’”¹

the man’s death—from

being sick at a young age—as not a

senseless point—not to—

by desire—reach such a thing in

that way²

This segment is from a long poem, way, in which each line and poem-segment is qualified (changed from within) by, and in, the entire structure of the extended writing. Yet the unplanned, forward structure is at once entirely changed by the minute, present-time unit. Real-time events ‘recorded’ (as only events as written, fragments that are sound patterns) were frequently so minute (with the exception of a friend dying of AIDS) that in passing, they could not be remembered later, had existence only as writing. Any event is qualified by the future even—in the writing itself.

One feels a sense of despair—trying to unravel a dichotomy that is despair. It’s impossible to undo it because it is similar to the conventions that exist.

I have to unravel it as that is (one’s) existing at all—interior instruction.

Yet someone else thinks that maintaining the dichotomy hierarchical is existing—for them.

Seated in the audience, much of which is volatile—two men are to arise—yet a destitute man is lying on the floor (he’s come in because it’s cold outside), he’s stinking, only a few teeth, drunk raving, lying he has no arms

drunk he can’t hear their asking him to be quiet.

The armless is dragged raving from the room by a crowd of men and put outside on the street. A young woman in the crowd comments that some people, disturbed by this, are voicing “sentimentality.”

When one of the two men arises—an outsider, strong, frisky, who has arms, also drunk, rises voluble and is dragged from the room and thrown into the street—he returns with a huge lionish cat in his arms and says “Look at this big cat” and is hurled through the door again—One of these men later says to oneself “And to think that you noticed this—there at a time” (one had written it in a segment—he hears it being read): as if one did not exist—as if only their existing occurred then.

He is no more responsible for that occurrence than oneself, although he was regarded as ‘in charge’ of that context in which one was an outsider. One as the outsider sees oneself as observing actively and at the same time being inactive in the past event and the insider as active yet unobservant there. The event itself occurs ‘between’ these.

(My) intention—in poetry—is to get complete observing at the same instant (space) as it being the action.

There’s no relation between events and events. Any. They are separate. Events that occur—(regardless of their interpretation—). (But also that they are at once only their interpretation and only their occurrence.)

Radicals in the sixties and seventies used to speak at the same time when authorities were speaking to change what the officials were saying.

Outside(-events) is bounced to be occurrence, itself.

Paul Celan was described (I can’t remember the source of this interpretation) as being essentially conflicted (just in written—or in spoken word also?) in his own language, German being the language of the nation (his own) that had exterminated his people. (His written language was) articulation within the language that is seen to be oppression/to be separation from that which one loves.

The dichotomy is impermanence/separation; a distinction made, for example, by Bob Perelman, between writing based in the “experiential” (thus without authority or as the ‘authority’ of the bogus self only)—

and writing that is articulation of/and as social polemic (the writing of which is then regarded as not being “narrative”—the word “narrative” used as if that were anecdotal per se). Yet in the distinction there is an equivalence drawn between ‘anecdotal’ and formal innovation itself.

Two sentences from Bob Perelman’s talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire: “This equation of social power, or say social intelligibility—the familiar—and poetic value challenges much of our poetics.” “The equation is less clear in any positive sense, i.e., that social marginality produces good poetry.”

The conception of a normative language as being dominant perspective (conception that there is such a dominant perspective; and that such is or should be determining) is hierarchical conception per se. I think that power is the poetic issue or narrative of this period. An aspect of the conflict broached in that narrative is: the continual transmogrification of gesture, making something into an intellectual concept that can’t simply exist there, only the concept of the gesture respected.

In academic terminology, for example, there is now a category spoken of as “other,” the assumption being that we are not that and therefore this area cannot be rendered, or even broached except from a distance. As if ‘we’ are of the world that articulates. The implication even is that if one is “other”—while a recipient of sympathy and elucidation, or lip-service—one being outside (as minorities, or lower class, at any rate experientially) has no repute or credibility, cannot speak. The assumption is that language be polemical or discursive exposition as it/one has no (or exposes there being no) intrinsic relation to the subject “other.”

Yet that is one.

Distinction as ‘doctrine’ and ‘experience’ is the conventional social separation here; that is, it is the way our experience is culturally described. The other side of this coin (the camp of “emotion”) bolsters the same view of reality but with an opposing allegiance: that is, the ‘opposite’ view (opposite from: ideology as basis) is that emotion/narrative/experience are aspects of “self” that, being viewed ‘inherently,’ appear not to be the same as (appear not to have any relation to) outside events. The personal, the confessional, is an “expression” of an inherent self as if that self were the cause (of events, of cognition), thus (in my view, and in that also of Perelman presumably) mistaking the nature of self in reality.

Yet either causal agent (self-scrutinizing ‘conceptualization’ or ‘concept of personal self’) are inaccurate as revelation of events—events’ natures and relation to each other. “Stillness of that order, perhaps a node peculiar to the mind alone.”³ They are aspects of hierarchical categorization that merely duplicate that categorization.

Giving a reading from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night), which is an intricate interweave, I included a passage, an overlay itself of seeing an impression (image) of blue dye on the surface of the eye only, dye that in fact in the circumstance is infused within the left side of the body of the person who thrashes being turned on a table.

A man speaking to me afterward referred only to the reference, in the writing, to the dye: “that sounds like something that happened to you,” with the implication tonally as well as in mentioning only that point in the writing, it is thus inferior

or that its happening explains the whole away.

it invalidates it by being experience

Bob Perelman argued (in his talk at the Assembling Alternatives symposium—attended by poets and professors from United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, China, and elsewhere—at the University of New Hampshire, 1996) that contemporary poets working in ‘experimentalist’ modes have failed because their writing, by being its formal medium—(that is, cognition being changed by its articulation)—does not have “social power” (in that poetry does not communicate with large numbers of the public).

His argument and his own writing practice imply a writing based on the use of social stereotype as a polemical device—which thus eschews one’s ‘interior’ thought/shape/motions articulated as motions/shape in syntax.

“Life opens into conceptless perspectives. Language surrounds chaos.”⁴ In an exchange in the Los Angeles Times between John Ashbery and reviewer Alexander Theroux, Theroux declares:

I am unaware of shooting at any bêtes noires in my review of his [Ashbery’s] books other than those [Pound, Stein, Olson, Zukofsky] who practice the crapulous and farcically self-defeating act of offering bad or half-made work under the guise of serious poetry to be pondered, when it remains in fact impossible to be understood…. Obscurantism is morally wrong precisely for the lie it tells in the pretense of coming forward with the truth it simultaneously—and always posturingly—refuses to divulge…. How can a poet of such byzantine contrivances miss my homely truth? Who should know better than he the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of calling gibberish “poetry” or nonsense “modernist”? We have evidence he is able to write a simple line. What kind of modernist mind do we need to understand “Once I let a guy blow me …”

The notion of “communication,” articulated as synonymous with power and as if a product with a normative format, is a slogan now at the same time that the schools and education are being contracted/denuded, to offer—to those who are not wealthy—curricula limited in informative, let alone exploratory, investigative content (such as history), that which is subject to conjecture.

Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy—it is writing that is conjecture.

‘Obscurantism’ is related to the market notion of ‘current history’ (the effect—the ‘social’—has already occurred supposedly) as cost-effective; the effect (of social power, or lack thereof) being assessed in present-time unrelated to the substance of occurrence.

Thought or apprehension—in this conception of utility—is not (to be) in relation to action which occurs (or as it occurs) outside.

All demonstrations (as writing or speaking) are sidetracked by being defined as a category. There’s no answer to one as that would admit of something other into the conversation.

At a time when bookstores are closing, the market argument is that books are not needed because they won’t sell. Barnes & Noble is receiving manuscripts from publishers to guide editors as to which manuscripts should be published based on projected sales. Big chains crush other bookstores, as well as publishing companies (Barnes & Noble’s market advantages, and its selection against non-format books). “And the diluted formalism of the academy (the formal culture of the U.S.) is anemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality.”⁵

The notion of defining ‘the life’ narrative as inferior is also defining what ‘the life’ is.

Defining is conceptualizing that separation of the public and ‘interior’ as power.

Writing may be discursive connections or stream-series of distillation of apprehension, the acknowledgment of its narrative being its scrutiny. The contemporary poetic-polemics association of “narrative” as being only convention—‘experience’ thus denigrated, not regarded as exploratory—in fact does not allow scrutiny of one’s own polemic.

There is a conflation in leftist thought with conservative thought in devaluing writing/experience as demonstration/process (rather than doctrine-based). “Procedure” or formalism as modes of writing are embraced by both.

A characteristic of conservative thought is iteration of tradition for its own sake, valuable in that it is that. Social conditioning is transcended—there is no “other”—rather than perspective itself being seen being created. Without the conception of the social as phenomenological, actions that are rebellious in response to whatever conditions, are seen as ‘personal’ merely. Articulating outside’s warp imitated as being one—is interpreted as one’s being unable to comprehend, couldn’t put things together.⁶ A syntax that is this dismemberment will be incomprehensible in the framework of conservative thought (one characteristic of which: conception of the past as entity to be preserved as being the present). In terms of a conservative framework, ‘dis-location’ is seen as merely personal aberration or failure to comprehend the whole, rather than strategic and phenomenological.

Phenomenological ‘dis-location’ in writing is strategic and specific, detail arising from or noting social conditions or background; which conservative ideology regards as without transcendence, transient. Yet such transience is change as writing’s subject (in avant garde or radical practices).

The view of aberration as failure is an exclusion that is an action, rendering what it defines as minor to the condition of nonexistent or irrelevant ‘over-time.’ (As if there were an ‘objective’ cultural basis that becomes or is ‘history.’)

Polemics was to be demonstration (that was the intention)—yet now poetry is society’s secret interior—thought’s demonstration is scrutiny (there is no ‘history,’ because that is merely a description of an overview)—in that polemics-based writing merely imposes point of view and suppresses demonstration.

Right-wing Republicans castigate labor on the radio by asking “how can ‘our’ society’s labor compete while wearing combat boots?” That is, they should not have labor demands in order to compete in the world market.

One should dismantle protection of oneself in laboring for others in order to compete with outsiders—who can underbid one if employed by those others.

The attitude that the writing is invalidated by it being experience has its corollary—in the objection to there being in writing ‘thought’ which is at one in the same time as ‘occurrence.’ Is that occurrence.

This is what makes the present-time troubling, as Gertrude Stein said.

That ‘one’ is separate in occurrence (as if occurrence were collective) is particularly heinous to Americans.

Perelman (in that articulation of ‘social power’) is taking both of these positions (critique of and authority) at once, deftly enshrining authority—seemingly in the ‘outside’ as if that were causal. The illusion of ‘occurrence’ and that it is ‘collective.’

‘Social power’ is the formation (‘I’) am trying to (‘must’) dispel.

(The delineated cultural dichotomy itself ‘makes’ the reverberation in this last above sentence only ‘extreme’ defined as such [categorical terms such as “lyrical” “personal”—negatives from a radical perspective].

One can reverberate that ridicule itself [as echo of social] on oneself effectively as the writing-syntax—to ‘bounce’ it to be a separated occurrence also.

This can reveal something about ‘one’ in relation to social occurrence. And also the intention is to see what occurrence is.)

Polemical device as a writing process isn’t to investigate shape and motion to find out what the event is—it is to instruct what one is to think about the event.

But the event (any) isn’t even there (as that formation).

One/events can only exist outside of formation there.

People in this culture are (‘described as’ being) ‘given’ the view (as if view and description were an action, and as if it were causal) that they like that which is liked—if something appears not liked (by others) it can’t have value. ‘Separation’ therefore is to be ‘ridicule’ itself.

As successful current poetic-critical ‘theory’—a description of itself as ‘radical’ (left), which is at once sign and definition of status, is dependent on reproducing the conventional distinctions (as categories of thought).

The closing of bookstores and the utter commercialization of publishing and distribution indicate there will be few reading anywhere.

My sense is ‘subjectivity’—rendered at all—is separation per se simply as observation of phenomena.

Poetically, this separation itself (delineated as writing, as its shape/syntax) is also a shadow (evocation) of that which is ‘exterior,’ the public.

Much of contemporary writing practice (of the ‘experimentalist’ mode) now is delineation (in its syntax—i.e. it is gestural, an action) of this separation of one. Writing now is being the ‘interior’ and the ‘exterior.’ To make these occur, and to see them ‘real’-ly.

“We’re not going to go on playing games, even if the rules are downright fascinating. We require a situation more like it really is—no rules at all. Only when we make them do it in our labs do crystals win our games. Do they then? I wonder.”⁷

—in one’s conflict—in surveillance—is at once interior and exterior. The ‘directions’ (as in a text of a play, in italics), which is the same as the rendering (as reading) of public context/scene, are the same as interior-speaking to oneself. Writing to engage the interior of the writing itself, (which are then) as exterior events, for anything to occur—its motions change events.

The discovery that poetry has no relation to society—I’d been struggling to maintain a relation. Yet writing’s an interiorization (not/of that relation?). That is a separate action.

In a critical reading group where, in one meeting, writers were discussing dreams they had had, a man, having recounted (or read) his dream, whose connections and process were its activity said—yet how could this (dream) be translated into a thought that was not personal, that was not the dream? (to be made useful—in that it is not from oneself, not a mind action.)

Articulated only as experience—an intense separation where there’s no translation. If one speaks his language one can’t be in friendship with him. Friendship having to do with extending across the social line or interior division where one has no power. Or it is that, one articulates a relation to him that is not related to power.

My sense of relief that ‘poetry has no relation to society’—is that one has despair in ‘experiencing’ that people have no connection to actions (outside, or their own)—even though these actions as if taking place ‘secretly’ change everything.

That ‘poetry’ (interior) ‘has no relation’ occurs as its being extended, as it is not determined actions by being ‘those’ (initiating in that space)—it has to be continual motions.

In a footnote to his book The Marginalization of Poetry, Perelman quotes a passage from my exchange with Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange.” In this complex exchange, (published in the Poetics Journal),⁸ I was answering Silliman’s position that women, gays, and minorities tend to write “conventional narrative” in that they have to “tell their stories,” arising from their social conditions; whereas white heterosexual male writers (he says) are in a position to experiment formally.

The passage that Perelman quoted from my response to Silliman implies that I simply ‘favor’ “narrative” (whatever that is); that is, it reverses, erases the argument I was making by quoting a tiny passage out of context.

A person describing a creationist view that all minute events and phenomena are in God’s eye or plan beforehand—so evolution cannot exist or occur—nothing is occurring first or apart from the plan—no actions are later events; astonished, I made the remark, “This is completely alien to poetry.” Alien to observation, and also to action.

There is no cause or effect—the moment of occurrence doesn’t exist either—in that the present moment is disjunction per se only (Nāgārjunian logic, which is early Zen, rendering modern physics?). All times (past, present, and future) are occurring at the same time separately as that disjunctive space or moment (rendition of Dōgen’s and Einstein’s sense of being as time). So occurrence is not hierarchically ordered. (These views of time and being are also [elsewhere] articulated as socially shared experiences.)

The language that is ‘experimentally’ based corresponds to people’s experience; as the act of ‘one’s’ experiencing; and (though not widely disseminated, thus not part of ‘communal’ experience) it is not an ‘elite’ language.

Doctrine doesn’t reflect ‘our’/their experience; is alien to it.

The contradictory, problematic factor is in divorcing ‘experience’ from ‘non-referential’ writing (originally with radical intention); a separation that sometimes simply stems from an attitude that ‘experience’ is lowly (that is, from snobbery and also regard for authority as opposed to demonstration).

One point I made to Silliman in the exchange was that the form of one’s articulation may be a reconstituting of the general social narrative, may be a radical change in expression arising from one’s separation from social convention.

Silliman’s position was negating the factor of the individual’s articulation as motions/shape in syntax being a radical change in thought.

In the early eighties, Silliman, in conversation and talks in San Francisco, urged poets to write syntax that was paragraphs without line breaks, paratactic, described as a communal, non-individualistic expression. The syntax has a recognizable sound pattern (which is what poetic syntaxes are, as from other periods, say languages called Beat or New York School). In the same spirit in that period, Bob Perelman stated, during a talk given by Michael Palmer on autobiography, that the erotic was not to enter into writing, the erotic was a form of ego to be stricken or omitted from writing. (At the time, this was related to a Marxist-based conception of writing that should be egoless: ‘non-narrative’ is not ‘self-expression’—that’s an action.)⁹

Roughly, paratactic syntax is juxtaposition to each other of ‘unrelated,’ which itself becomes a form of relation, statements or questions in one paragraph—a series of such leaps in continuing paragraphs or lines. A single statement is potentially examined or refuted by being in a series of such single ‘unrelated’ statements. This is a form of ‘not holding onto a thought.’ However, I think in order for the structure not to be deterministic, one would have to transgress the entirety—(as reader or writer) not be ‘inside’ the statements or questions having to respond to them. Either power or critique of it occurring as poetic syntax (of the time), ‘one’ must continually instigate—that is, one will write outside a ‘given’ syntax; not being defined by social articulation in any instant as syntactically.

There is no way in which women can apprehend conservative social articulation if they write uniform syntax (dictated by men) that excises the erotic.

One could not be separating the event—from/as thought (or apprehension).

Recently a man giving a (literary) talk showed slides of a ‘pin-up girl’—interpreting the past to make the point that he thought she had a lot of “autonomy.” The subject (pin-up girl¹⁰) has no writing ‘as poetry’/expression that’s its writing—and she’s ‘in’ the past. Granting those in the past, in their erotic being, “autonomy.”

Present as disjunct per se only—that space/time cannot be his narrative—or one’s. Event is between. One has to modify one’s tone if one is a woman to be heard as saying anything.

“To change without belief is anarchistic as instinct pricks from the Latin (stinguere), no law but that the absence of law is the resistance of love instinct with tact like the expression of this thought.”¹¹

Assessing relations of power between people—such as that say based in gender—merely becomes the articulating of those relations, as oneself having power. One would have to disrupt in writing one’s own articulation of power at all.

A communal syntax being community could have occurred in an instant. When it occurs again, it isn’t in the same syntax?

Format (when experiment becomes format) is not articulating occurrence (events/thought). It cannot, inherently. That is, those experimenting formally (as per Silliman’s description) by accepting polemic directive are per se not practicing experiment—in that they are divorced from the live gesture?

The very nature of descriptive language is ‘other’ than the subject. What Giorgio Agamben identifies (locating it in infancy) as a silent pre-language state is going on at all times in one simultaneously ‘alongside’ one’s language apprehension.¹²

(“Experiment”—not as itself a brand of writing or as ‘unfinished’ ‘attempts’ rather than the ‘finished product’—but as ‘scientific experiment’: to find out what something is, or to find out what’s happening.)

In the view (such as in Anne Waldman’s statements¹³) that (which is the real) poetry is “speech,” there’s a sense of “speech” (spoken is social, convention of ‘conversation’?)—that is not “thought” [interior], is not ‘felt spatially / such as correspondences in the limbs.’ Tonal is considered thus as ranges of speaking voice or breath.

Yet poets have been writing other tones—that are in the written text only—tones not occurring as speaking. These are ‘sounded’ silently, spatially—a separation; between ‘one’ and ‘social’? Or separation between ‘one’ and ‘correspondences in the limbs’—and night. (As if a butterfly and the butterfly motion of a swimmer.)

We’ve mutated and become ventriloquists who speak ‘inner’ unspoken ‘movements’ and various types of speech at the same time.

I was interested in a syntax whose very mode of observation was to reveal its structure; that is, its subject and its mode are subjectivity being observation. Since it is itself subjective the viewpoint is ‘without basis.’ It removes its own basis, that of exterior authority, as a critique of itself.

As an example, sentences that are single, dual, or multiple clauses are only intonations, dislocating their ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ subject—by one’s ‘interior’ intonation and ‘exterior’ reference being the same (being a clause of the sentence, dissonant notes played at the same time) and as such also mutually exclusive, separately critiquing each other.

Statements of definition (that perceived as ‘givens’ ‘in-coming’ from the outside society, which ‘determine’ social reality) are apprehended as bogus. Because they are revealed as subjective, without basis. One is only constructing a reflection of these as one’s reorientation of apprehension. The syntax itself reorients one’s apprehension (by continual dis-location) and enables that which is exterior to be included in a process of its examination, necessarily self-examination.

My argument to Silliman was that no one can conceive within the ‘given’ language—and articulate reality, as that. It can’t be ‘there’ because it isn’t that.

This may or may not be a different concern from that of women and imported minorities working here as illegal indentured servants who are slaves, for example.

That is, individuals in writing or speaking may create a different syntax to articulate experience, as that is the only way experience occurs. Or they may describe their circumstances and contexts, as if from the outside, using normative language.

The dichotomy is in anyone as a function of the world? Language as interior and entirely from the outside at once—which is a series, starting up throughout.

“Holding to a course with the forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine what is unclear to be scrambled later from its perception of perfection by that continuing. Which is to change the world. As it does which is why, nothing individually lost, there’s a difference to be told.”¹⁴

Notes

1. Clark Coolidge, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994), 652. My intention in taking all the written quotes from one source was to indicate the similarity of direction articulated by poets with widely varying aesthetics collected in one text. I was pointing to the existence of a commonality, which is ‘public’ even if not numbered in millions. However, Joan Retallack accurately pointed out to me that I didn’t comment on the role in the canon of anthologizing: “A surface illusion of comprehensiveness gives these compendiums the power to conceptually blot out the possible presence of multitudes of other interesting writers and (in the case of the Hoover and Messerli anthologies) the small presses that publish them. I.e., they become a substitute (for teachers and writers) for going to the individual books of individual poets. That there are many anthologies of contemporary work coming out right now seems to me the only good sign…. Since the essay is entitled ‘The Cannon’ I immediately assumed you would be commenting on the way in which anthologies take over the reference market so to speak.”

2. Leslie Scalapino, way (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 105.

3. Clark Coolidge, in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 651.

4. Susan Howe, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 648.

5. Amiri Baraka, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 645.

6. “Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on.” Frank O’Hara, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 633.

7. John Cage, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 652.

8. Ron Silliman and Leslie Scalapino, “What / Person: From an Exchange,” Poetics Journal 9 “The Person,” pp. 51–68, ed. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, Berkeley, Calif., June 1991.

9. Bob Perelman doesn’t remember making this remark and states he would not make such a comment as it is puritanical and offensive. It was not recorded (the tape ended). His words were only part of an exchange in which a number of the men spoke, then agreed with his statement. No women spoke to this. He replied to this essay: “So I look at the picture of my literary position in your piece and see an inflexible anti-erotic commissar insisting that people write conventionally.” His point or remark to me here is well-taken: I do not mean to characterize his writing or thought in that manner, but rather to demonstrate occurrence in public expression of ideology.

10. Betty Page, referred to in a talk by Barrett Watten at the University of Maine.

11. Bernadette Mayer, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 659.

12. Infancy & History / Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben, Verso, 1993.

13. Talk given at Philip Whalen’s Birthday Reading at the San Francisco Art Institute, October 20, 1996; and talk given at Allen Ginsberg’s memorial in San Francisco.

14. Bernadette Mayer, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 659.