Peter Riley writes : > What I'm mainly happy to
>disagree about is the either/or between process and product,

Peter has always treated me well, and this is written in friendship; I
wasn't going to write at all, since I find myself in disagreement (I think)
with him, and did not want to sound disagreeable. But maybe there is
something I can say.

To begin with, with the citation from peter's e-letter : of course, where
process is the point, it becomes product.

The argument some, myself included, have with what "product" often refers
to, is a matter of what Robert Duncan used to complain of as "railings,
ramps, seeing-eye dogs"---and that the experience of this in a poem changes
with time, is evidenced for me when I read Duncan today : much feels
extraneous, that once felt necessary.

I suppose there is no escaping Peter's charge of "giant orthodoxy," which
cleverly turns the tables on us would-be and wannabe rebels. It might be
responded to with Pee-Wee Herman's "I know you are, but what am I?"
However, let me focus on the Maximus question.

The earlier poems as we see are much involved with representation which
takes the attention outside of the poem (and how odd, since Olson _said_ he
was against such distraction), and owes its presence in the poem to earlier
hopes for poetry, hopes the town of Gloucester itself, today, reveals in
all their vanity.

What still can be done in poetry---given the condition of the world of
which it is and in which it is written, 'takes place'---is to track the
movement of felt thought. Since this is not do-able without reference, the
question becomes one of emphasis, whereby reference is received as
secondary to the essential action of the poem.

(I speak out of my own prejudices, as well as, if Peter is correct, a vast
orthodoxy which has enlisted me. )

Hewing to the brevity e-mail anticipates, I will shortcut (hope this works)
by indicating the poetry of Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak, Deanna Ferguson,
Meredith Quartermain, Dan Farrell, Jeff Derksen, Christian Bøk, Darren
Wershler-Henry, from the Canadian context to which I am most drawn. Each
has learned the historical imperatives---those of poetry and those of
culture, demography, economics---of poetry and the sociology of
poetry---ably, by whatever (non)method, so writes the present through what
is left to us, of the poem.

(To pretend there has not been vast damage inflicted on Mind by events of
the past 90 years or so---all of my lifetime and Peter's---strikes me as
inadvisable, if not criminal, in the sense of accessory after the fact. And
What comfort, in useless reassurance? )

The later Maximus locates itself in its own thought's code more clearly
than do many of the earlier poems. Olson knew, but he looked for his means
to the practice of another era : While he maintained that we should be done
with the topic sentence, look at how some of his 'biggest' poems begin :
"What does not change/ is the will to change"; "I have had to learn the
simplest things/last"; "As the dead prey upon us,/ they are the dead in
ourselves".....I am not knocking the topic sentence, only pointing out
through quick example the geology of Olson's mind.

Because what one once has loved (or so it is with me) one always will love,
I love those poems whose first lines I quote above, still, and all that
surrounds them. I would not welcome them, written today. The virtual
revolution of the 60s was met with a counter-revolution that now rules the
world, and we do not look to see any imminent relief from this repression
(in kid gloves still for many of us, but driving a steam-roller over the
majority). Resistance through ecological education, environmental watchdog
groups, and---sometimes---the courts, are all I know that we have left to
work with : certainly, voting at the national level delivers us to Hague
clap-clap-clap or Blair clap-clap-clap, and their equivalents in other
nations.

And in the poem, no matter the unique path of our experience through the
maze of everyone's, there are equally few alternatives. There may still be
an authenticity of felt thought possible, a nothing vortex that is
something else, winnowed, wrested, or smelted from what-all is insidious
within our minds. You will know I do not speak of personal style, which I
find very various, as the zines appear in the mail.

Only to register a disagreement for which some causes may be offered.

David







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