The Romantic phase of English poetry is separated from that later branch we know as American by nothing less than the recovery of half the total span of the Western literary record. Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta stone in the 1820s, and the subsequent popularization of prebiblical civilizations, created the unique conditions in which a distinctively American literature arose. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman can be read as inaugurating an imaginal bibliographic recovery of the oldest written records (see Irwin).* It’s interesting to imagine that the now clear distinction between English and American writing may have been blurred if Keats and Shelley had lived long enough to follow the same archaeological research that mesmerized Whitman and his fellow Americans. Romanticism across Europe was stimulated by this first wave of archaeological and philological recoveries of the past. The tradition of English poetry is abundant with superinscriptions on, and rewritings of, this legacy. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and visions of Zoroaster are first animations from the new vista of the compost library—available to them, however, only in a mirage of anticipation.
American poetry is the first full opening of a field of archaic, scattered, incomplete, and scarcely surmised literacies from that compost library unearthed in the nineteenth century. The general atmosphere of hieroglyphics, undeciphered scripts, and the mystery of unimagined antiquities now recovered is what makes the America of Whitman’s generation a Renaissance, much as the recovery and circulation of Hellenistic materials constituted a European Renaissance four hundred years earlier; and it’s what gives force to Thoreau’s remark, “Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils” (The Journal, 16 March 1852). As Jack Spicer remarks, “As things decay they bring their equivalents into being.” Out of an Asiatic antiquity as old as any in the West, Confucius’s word was disseminated for half a century by Ezra Pound. Zukofsky’s Gilgamesh and Catullus: compost library, hothouse for his 80 Flowers. Olson’s Hesiod and “Song of Ullikummi” (read to honor Pound’s presence at the Spoletto festival in 1965): compost library. From that heat there have been notable recoveries by Olson’s students, like Origins : Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean by Charles Doria and Harris Lenowitz, and Charles Boer’s Homeric Hymns. The recovery of the compost library extends in all directions through the ground of American poetry, as poets become signatories of distant texts : Jerome Rothenberg’s large anthologies flower (as the word means) at the heart of this practice; David Meltzer’s anthology of Kabbalah; Ed Sanders’s Egypt; Nathaniel Mackey’s African Dogon (“a nomadic calligraphy, wandering, spinning off dark incalculable rhythms, its overtones humming like a compost of entanglement” [Alexander, 700]); Nathaniel Tarn’s Meso-America; Paul Metcalf’s American vernaculars; Susan Howe’s colonial New England captivity narratives; Gary Snyder’s and Kenneth Rexroth’s China and Japan; the India of Snyder, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Andrew Schelling; Clayton Eshleman’s Paleolothic Dordogne; Paul Blackburn’s Provence and the Provençal vestiges of Gallo-Roman antiquity for Gustaf Sobin—these are all integral to a poetics of the archaic, restored exercises of Homo projectivis (Sobin, Luminous Debris, 20). And through the same attentions a different Greece and Rome have come into view in Olson, Zukofsky, and (via H.D.’s corpus hermeticum) Robert Duncan, Robert Kelly, Guy Davenport, and Anne Waldman. Even the kitsch statuary of the ancient Near East in Albert Goldbarth’s “junktique” catalogs resonate with the “mantic compost” of Eugene Jolas.
Uniquely indebted to this condition of filtration and infiltration is The Tablets by Armand Schwerner, which purports to be a scholarly edition of archaic tablet inscriptions, with extensive ellipses, bracketed guesses at missing words, notes and professional citations accompanying a text uniquely suited to this labor of recovered antiquity in American poetry. Tablet X reduces the project to a decisive minimum:
TABLET X
In his notes for The Tablets, Schwerner suggests the gist of his project in these lines by Zukofsky : “My poetics has old ochre in it / On walls of a civilized cave” (The Tablets, 139). The doubling of the archaic shadow projected over a contemporary poem deepens the lines into the ominous voice of Mesopotamian injunctions:
go into all the places you’re frightened of
and forget why you came, like the dead.
Likewise, Heraclitus : “We assume a new being in death : we become protectors of the living and the dead” (Davenport translation, 22).
Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.
What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.
American writing itself appears to be contingent on the reclamation of the compost library. Libraries as we know them—with subject classifications and arrangements, procedures for withdrawing or examining the holdings, which are conscientiously diverse—are as old as cities. Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians had libraries. The Greeks had them relatively late (and, as legend has it, only at the behest of tyrants). From the bulk of Mesopotamian texts available, it is clear that archives—as opposed to libraries—were administrative practicalities, part of the bureaucracy in its maintenance of land deeds, contracts, inventory reports, and so on. What we would regard as literature occupied the same limited portion of public documents five thousand years ago as it does now. Sometime between 3000 and 2000 B.C. there arose libraries as distinct from archives, the difference being that an archive preserves all the relevant documentation on a given topic, or for a specific purpose—such as authenticating the history of a dynasty—whereas a library proposes in its very arrangement a field of material yet to come, for purposes unknown. Early religions were characteristically archival, and books such as the Bible are anthologies constituting an archive. The conflict between the archive of the Bible and the library of Hellenistic heritage is one of the more interesting tensions carried out in monastic life between the early Christian era and the Italian Renaissance. The spirit of the library is not hierarchy, but endless proliferation.* Matthew Arnold suggests as much in his famous distinction between Hellenistic expansive free play of consciousness and Hebraic (in which he includes Christian) conscientiousness and devotion : “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (Culture and Anarchy, chap. 4).
From the earliest times, however, the open-ended organization of the library carried an implacable suggestiveness. Script could, by analogy, contaminate everything. The bones of sacrifices are “the oldest approaches to a sort of writing” (Richardson, 138); the early Assyrian palaces were regarded as the books of the history of the king’s reign; and now we imagine DNA to be a script of biological destiny. To the Chaldeans, chaos meant “without books.” The book and the library were some of the earliest symbolic distinctions the urban bureaucratic mind placed between itself and the deep past. Archives could claim completion and authority by association with religious dogma and military power, but libraries by nature resist culmination : there’s only more and more, or further to dig. A natural phenomenon. In the compost library books have a way of collapsing into each other, not in the improvements of more “authoritative” editions or versions, but by constant recycling.
Not one but many energies shape the field.
It is a vortex. It is a compost.
“[T]here is a mound,” writes A. R. Ammons, “in the poet’s mind dead language is hauled / off to and burned down on, the energy held and // shaped into new turns and clusters.” Ronald Johnson ventilates Paradise Lost by removing most of the words of Milton’s poem, retaining others in a ventilated scenario (each word remains in its original location) that exemplifies composting poetry:
heaven’s fire
From wing to wing, and
Words interwove with
mortal
Matchless,
change
of mind,
In Johnson’s treatment of Milton, the words have changed their mind.
Johnson had been primed in the ventilation method by his friend Jonathan Williams (working with Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex), who summons Olson, Zukofsky, Davenport, and others as instigators of the practice. “I would affirm ‘that poems’ are but the deified prosaic speech of plain men and women; that ‘art’ is in raising the common to grace … [and] that the poet is ‘the guy* who puts things together’” (“Excavations from the Case-Histories of Havelock Ellis,” Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ). Williams specializes in putting together captivating morsels of the living vernacular (as in his “Selected Listings from the Western Carolina Telephone Company’s Directory,” which includes Gentry Crisp, O. U. Muse, Zero Webb, and Hope Strong—a feat matched by Metcalf’s Zip Odes [Collected Works, 2:126-81]); it’s characteristic that his appetite encompasses print as readily as speech, as three of his books (An Ear in Bartram’s Tree, The Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ, and Elite/Elate Poems) amass 120 epigraphs, including this choice dictum from Albert Einstein : “Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler” (“In Lieu of a Preface,” Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ).
Poets have often been committed readers, but modern American poetry has been a resuscitation of reading into wreading, or nosing into the compost library.* Before Pound and Olson, we have no instances of poets whose reading itself becomes the manifest fulcrum of their commitment to poetry. If there is a precedent, it is Coleridge in his notebooks, which are themselves only opened to their poetic potential by an uncanny resemblance to Olson’s practice in The Maximus Poems. The Cantos are not only intricately involved with the use of other texts, but are a massive exhortation to be aware of a specific library. Some of the earlier Cantos are re-presentational (Chinese history is digested from de Mailla’s thirteen-volume history in French), but later sections implore the reader to examine Alexander Del Mar, John Heydon, Apollonius, The Sacred Edict of Kang Hsi, and much more. These later Cantos become a textual counterpart to the literary modernism that Pound had a great hand in establishing; and part of the symmetry latent in his life’s work is a singular proposition to his readers, as if to say : you heeded my appraisals of Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, Gaudier, Williams, Frost, cummings, Hemingway, and others, now follow my leads into economics, history of law, pantheistic ceremony, and so on. Pound’s adversary position in the literary world of his time has continued in the reluctant academic dissemination of the critical injunctions implicated in his poetic practice. In an institutional (archival) framework stressing the primacy of the text itself, Pound’s work keeps grossly forwarding a library. There is no shortcut. “The greatest barrier is probably set up by teachers who know a little more than the public, who want to exploit their fractional knowledge, and who are thoroughly opposed to making the least effort to learn anything more” (ABC of Reading, 35). Howard McCord remarks in Gnomonology, “the classics are becoming occult, as the Bible has been for centuries.” There is a distinction between recommended books—Pound as critic and arbiter of the library—and the mass of materials that breaks across the prow of The Cantos. With Olson, however, having the advantage of Pound’s precedent, it’s all the same. Olson’s reading is intrinsic to a frame of mind that makes no distinction between reading and writing. It’s all wreading. We read passages of The Maximus Poems without the slightest suspicion that the text is closely paraphrasing other material. My condition is this embodiment—this is what the text implies for such materials. And if a text that is identifiably by Hesiod is embedded in Maximus IV, V, VI, there is no need of cues to alert the reader to a bibliographic event, as Hesiod in such a context—in the gravity of so inner an inherence—cannot appear as Hesiod because he’s no longer alive to make the claim. His appearance is abbreviated into “Olson,” who comes to share the same logos, and both exit together into that enlarged capacity, Maximus.
Olson takes a step beyond Pound in realizing the compost library as the materiality germane to his own work and therefore the embodiment of his concerns. Olson is no advocate for the library; he is inseparable from it. The Maximus Poems greet the eyes like tattered papyrus, frayed tablet; the organization and distribution of the words, beginning with the second volume, invite the consideration that the visible text is hedged all about with invisible text. As Olson’s writing extended restlessly to whatever was at hand, the reduction of that writing to a book comes to seem more and more precarious and arbitrary. The writing on the windowsill in his Gloucester apartment returns us to the Assyrian palace, at once codex and domicile. It also compels attention back to those earliest depositories of human creativity, the cave walls of the Paleolithic, which in their record of thousands of years of overlaid application are the primal image of what the mind looks like projected over time. The dominant animal content seems singular only in retrospect, as our eyes condense the theme into a momentary obsession. But the truth is that those images are the most sustained objects of study recorded, and the singularity of that persistence challenges our oculocentrism, which identifies image at shutter speed, 125th of a second.
Image is a limit. But what is opened up between images—in the unsettling flicker on a movie screen—is motion. So there are limits, and
Limits
are what any of us
are inside of.
But as Emerson insists in “Circles,” “The only sin is limitation.” “We can afford to allow the limitation,” he clarifies in “Fate,” “if we know it is the meter of the growing man.” Meter : measure of expansion. Literacy in the compost library is just such an actualization that it takes the psyche to be real, its actions to be consequent, and life as expansive. “Perhaps it is the role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen,” writes Lyn Hejinian (Language of Inquiry, 391). “Life recognized as happening restores event,” says Olson (“Chiasma,” 41), whose aspiration is to overcome the commercialism lamented at the beginning of The Maximus Poems, to be restored to the unmistakable : the consequential reality of generative human event.