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Ammiel Alcalay/Republics of Poetry Republics of Poetry Ammiel Alcalay Since 1955, poetry or verse as some would prefer it be called has, despite all forebodings that it was dying, taken through a handful of writers in the United States, a stranglehold on established modes of thought, analysis & attention. John Wieners, 1972 One night in a restaurant on Elmwood street, Charles [Olson] and John Wieners and Harvey [Brown] and whoever else was at our table began smoking joints. Nobody did anything about it. The revolution was underway, and poets were the political leaders. Charles was to be the president of that Republic. Later, during the summer when he tried to make the Berkeley Poetry Conference into a political convention, some, including a few of his best friends and supporters, did not return after intermission. That, really, was the end of that. When he returned to Buffalo, he raged about it at Onetto’s; I’d never seen him in such agony. He had been wrong, he thought. But then his conviction would return and he’d curse his false friends for deserting him. There remains a marvelous “conspiracy theory” to be created about this conference and the “politics” surrounding it. As a result of Intelligence Agency action or not, by the end of 1969 all living revolutionary leadership was dead or in hiding. Rock music had met its limit at Altamont and Ed Sanders would soon investigate the “Manson Family” murders... Recently I had a brief exchange of e-mail with a young academic who is interested in how Charles and Robert Creeley shaped their careers... Her interest strikes me as genuine. But I have been unable to communicate to her the dimension of spirit in which Charles lived and worked. There seems to be no explaining it to the next generation. Albert Glover, March ‘97 If we are the seminal fluidity, then we contain already, as Whitman knew, everything, “diddling” (Poe) as well as the Good, however forced sometimes the dilation as seen from old heroic organization before the shit rolled like termite droppings into the load-bearing bridges for everyone to cross into Dealy Plaza, Dallas “takes us” November 22, 1963, and not only Oswald and Ruby, but Guy Bannister, Shaw, Ferrie, Bloomfield and Permindex, now Roscoe White and more aliens up from the South, Watergate’s Sturgis, Union survivors up North, all those insane in Honolulu since the birth of the Nation/Hail to the Chief shot American Transcendentalism out of the feudal individual and delivered into the hands of Walt’s “unprecedented average,” thank you Abe, thanks Jack, now it’s up to us. John Clarke It has been thirty-five years since the death of American poet Charles Olson in 1970, and more than fifty years since Olson failed to get a Fulbright fellowship to study Sumerian civilization in the Iraq that now features a Burger King catering to occupying American forces atop the ruins of Ur. While all the signs were there then, the country Olson lived in would be almost unrecognizable to him now, or, at the very least, fulfill his vision of where things were heading: “pejorocracy” has come to stay, and much more than “sound, itself” is “neoned” in, as Olson wrote in the first Maximus poem, written in the early 1950s. The year after he died, in 1971, following urban uprisings, the black power movement and many other insurgencies, the Winter Soldiers, made up of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, attempted to lead the country into “a turning.” But through repression, economic and psychological warfare, that “turning” instead imploded into covert wars, imprisonment on a massive scale (from 200,000 in the early 1970s to over 2 million presently), and the flexing of imperial muscle that has put us in Afghanistan, Iraq, and any number of other places Americans really have no business being. The suppression and denial of that “turning” turned us inside out, making our lives and experiences almost unrecognizable, as if they had taken place in some distant land buried by newly created needs piled up to suffocate us. If you wore an army jacket in 1969, 1970, or 1971, it either meant you were a veteran or that you identified with the soldiers and veterans who were fighting the war against the war in Vietnam. That was still the case when I took classes at City College in New York in the mid 1970s, but becoming less so. I was younger and the draft had passed me by, but a number of the students studying Ancient Greek with me were older, survivors of the war in Vietnam and eager to find and lose themselves in texts as archaic and startling as their experiences must have been. By the late 1970s, I had set off on part of a journey through languages and places whose logical cohesion lasted close to twenty years. On the surface, this journey seemed to lead away from the poetry and ways of thinking I was most intimately connected to, away from a very rooted sense of place and language that, even as a first generation American, held deep claims on me. Yet, as I came to see, by leading more directly back to that part of me I can call home, this journey let me grapple more tenaciously with those very claims, with more tools at my disposal. Throughout, Olson’s work, so much of it still unedited, has helped me rediscover old things while finding new things that confirm my innermost sense. In a 1950 letter to Roland Mason, Olson wrote: I am struck with the feeling that the rest of the world is just now getting what the Americans have been putting up with a long time; that we are “experienced” in the dread business of this reality — that Melville had the under-parts of what Rimbaud didn’t even know; that the Am Civil War itself was the predecessor of what this century is the international civil war of; and that the same victor now will be the gross thing which won, here, then: MATERIALISM. For me this way back has led to the poetry I began reading as a teenager, and to a slow but ongoing immersion into Ancient America, as an essential element missing in our generalized and circumscribed histories. This shifting perspective has also meant learning how to read my own poems, to understand how to disengage from and unlearn the assumptions in which those poems have become embedded. The American poet Jack Spicer said it as well as anyone: It’s just as important to be able to understand your own poetry as someone else’s. And most poets I know, including some that I admire, don’t read their own poems. I mean they read them out loud to audiences but they very seldom read them back to see what the things are that would scare them about them. They just, you know, put them in orphan asylums. Grove Press and that kind of thing. Just leave them there and get fifty bucks for ‘em and you know — a baby farm. The farm analogy is not far-fetched: like genetic engineering tampering with nature, once means are available, production can become an end in itself. But it can be just as important not to write, not to follow certain paths, even those your own work clears for you. Spicer again: “And the business of being able not to do something, especially things which are so important to you, are you, takes a tremendous amount of patience.” For me, the practice of this patience has meant working in areas I was compelled to take action in, particularly through political interventions that knowledge of languages opened up for me. Was this at the cost of poetry? Perhaps, but can poetry be the same after such encounters? A number of the pieces in this book directly concern Charles Olson. The approach and subject matter of all of them, however, have more to do with the deeper politics of where Olson is and is not now to be found in our culture than with a particular interpretation of his thought and poetry. The general absence of Olson in the world claiming the terms of poetry for itself is quite disturbing, particularly as questions of politics have re-emerged, sometimes gingerly and other times with blunt force, in the wake of 9/11. In an interview that Henry Ferrini, Anne Waldman and I conducted with Amiri Baraka for Ferrini’s film Poet and the City: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, Baraka talked about the larger significance Olson’s trajectory had for him and for the culture as a whole: To me, Olson’s concept of the polis was just simply the idea that you had to be grounded in the concerns of the people, that the people are finally the makers of history, and that you have to be grounded in what is historical in that sense. What are the concerns of the people? Why are they these concerns? The whole question of putting the hinge back on the door. That is, trying to find out what had been hidden from us by the emergence of this new one-sided society. That was important, particularly for me being black because I knew part of that was the connection to Africa. Where are the foundations of the world from? Charles was saying, “you have to go back, you have to go back.” One of the most important parts was language, you know, the expression of life is language, and you have to grasp languages.
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