Hi Mark - "were allowed to see" is perhaps a little overstated: we
could, perhaps, have looked...Rexroth was easily available in England in
the 60s, if I may speak from personal experience, and I loved what I
read - Olson I only took in in snippets from various anthologies, read
him on Melville of course - I will admit to reading his poetry with
difficulty, still; the other names were more or less obscure. I remember
John Fuller in the TLS casting contemptuous aspersions on a volume of
Duncan that landed on British shores - that actually led, together with
my interest in HD, to my beginning to get into his work in the early 70s
(there is an Amerikahaus in Frankfurt - now completely de-booked &
computerized, I believe), while Donald Davie had led me to Dorn before I
left England: *Gunslinger* blew my mind. And I consider that official
culture mediators like the TLS or that influential anthology *The New
Poetry* certainly were pushing Lowell & Berryman more or less to the
exclusion of work by Creeley(or indeed the so-called New York school) -
but there were after all other mediators, little mags, Compendium
bookshop in Camden, there was that Penguin anthology - by Donald Allen?
etc etc. OK - what I'm saying is, there may have been a heavy investment
in the work of a few poets by leading pundits, but anyone with access to
a public library (and they were pretty good then) could make
discoveries, and this can't have been so different in the States. I
picked up Frank O'Hara in that Amerikahaus, for instance. Whether the
Objectivists et al were indeed "their betters" is a moot point & might
depend on where you stand & what you're looking for; I don't see that
depreciating A makes B any better. Does it really matter what "official"
culture pushes as the cat's whiskers du jour? It does seem to me that
you harp on it a bit. If there is a future then the dross will sink to
the bottom of the barrel.
But I'm a little suspicious, too, now, of this emphasis on Berryman as
elegist - the stuff on Delmore Schwartz & others quite honestly strikes
me as repetitive, even dull or slushy ("you delivered infinite babies,
in one great birth" on WCW) , not up to the standard of "Life, friends,
is boring" etc, and though *77 Dream Songs* is his best volume, his best
elegiac lines are in the *His Toy* volume : "The leaves fall, lives
fall, every little while/you can count with stirring love on a new
loss/& an emptier place./ The style is black jade at all seasons, the
style/is burning leaves and a shelving of moss/over each planted face."
Of course, he gives himself away here - it's all about "style" &
"planting" those faces/names in his verse: a lot of the writing in the
later Dream Songs is memorializing rather than elegy, mossy with
desperate ego. Which some would see as his special quality, perhaps, if
not his saving grace.
Martin


Mark Weiss wrote:

> The issue, Robin, is not the generations, but the slice of them most
> of us
> were allowed to see, which didn't include their contemporaries like
> Olson,
> Rexroth, Niedecker, Rukeyser, Oppen, Reznikoff--need I continue? That
> official bunch did a good job promoting themselves and each other to the
> exclusion of, let me say, their betters.
>
> Mark