Because many of the poets most prominent in This Compost have not been widely anthologized or received much critical attention, the following entries provide rudimentary contextual data. Excluded are those figures securely canonized, from Whitman to the generation of modernists (Pound, H.D., et al.), and others who are cited only in passing.
Ammons, A. R. (1926–2001)
Though Ammons is rarely considered in relation to open field poetics, his work nonetheless shares an improvisatory openness with the poetics of Olson, Duncan, and others. See, in particular, the long poems Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965, written on a continuous roll of adding-machine paper), Sphere, (1974), and Garbage (1993).
Ashbery, John (b. 1927)
His fame in recent decades has obscured the fact that Ashbery was first anthologized by Donald Allen in The New American Poetry (1960), a context that had extensive implications for readers of the early innovative books The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and Three Poems (1972). Ashbery’s unorthodox tastes are nicely on display in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, Other Traditions (2000), and have informed his prodigious output (twenty-one volumes of poetry through 2000), which includes many long poems (e.g., “Litany” in As We Know [1979], Flow Chart [1991], and Girls on the Run [1999]). “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is Ashbery’s most widely known poem, although it is not typical of his work in general.
Blaser, Robin (b. 1925)
Associated with Duncan and Spicer in Berkeley in the late 1940s, Blaser moved in 1966 to Vancouver, where a major symposium honoring his lifework was held in 1995 (published as The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Charles Watts and Edward Byrne). His various books of poetry were always conceived as part of a unified field, finally published as The Holy Forest (1993). Blaser is also literary executor for Jack Spicer, whose Collected Books he edited (1975).
Brandi, John (b. 1943)
Like Ginsberg and Waldman, Brandi is an indefatigable traveling poet, though he takes special care in his work to illuminate a specific geographical continuum from the American Southwest down to South America. Diary from a Journey to the Middle of the World (1979) is a characteristic title. The numerous chapbooks have been culled for That Back Road In : Selected Poems, 1972–1983 and Heartbeat Geography : Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1966–1994. In each of his books Brandi’s calligraphic realizations (which sometimes incorporate poems) provide a handsome visual complement to the writing. There is also a collection of essays and memoirs, Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye : Notes from the High Desert (2000).
Clarke, John (1933-92)
A Blake scholar, Clarke was a colleague at the University of Buffalo when Olson was there, and after Olson’s death he convened the chapbook series “A Curriculum of the Soul,” the titles of which were based on Olson’s outline (contributors include Joanne Kyger, Duncan McNaughton, Robin Blaser, Michael McClure, and many more). Clarke’s immersion in the cosmological manifold of Olsonian bibliographies is abundantly evident not only in his lectures, From Feathers to Iron (1987), but in his sonnet sequences, which include The End of This Side (1979) and the posthumous In the Analogy (1997).
Creeley, Robert (b. 1926)
A teacher at Black Mountain College and editor of Black Mountain Review (1954–57), Creeley has since been associated indelibly with Olson and Duncan. His voluminous correspondence with Olson fills nine volumes. Creeley is a generous promoter and astute chronicler of the work of his peers, and his Collected Essays (1989) is an invaluable document. The Collected Poems, 1945–1975 gathers the work for which he is most famous (including the books For Love and Words, among the best-selling poetry titles of the 1960s), and it has been followed by a half dozen other collections. Creeley has often collaborated with visual artists—the subject of an extensive exhibition in the New York Public Library (1999).
Dorn, Edward (1929–99)
A student of Olson’s at Black Mountain, in the late 1960s Dorn lived in England, where Fulcrum Press published Geography (1965), The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), and the first installment of his mock epic Gunslinger (1969, completed 1975). Gunslinger and later work made it clear that Dorn was unique among his peers in being a poet of wit. He also had a keen sense of the underdog, evident in his stories Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World; his documentary study, The Shoshoneans; and the poetic lament Recollections of Gran Apacheria (1974). As coeditor of the gazette Rolling Stock, and in the poetry collection Abhorrences (1990), Dorn became a chronicler of decades as psychohistorical complexes. Way West (1993) offers a selection from thirty years of stories, poems, and essays.
Collaborator with Spicer and Blaser in the Berkeley “Poetry Renaissance” of the 1940s, Duncan briefly taught at Black Mountain College before returning to San Francisco, where he lived the rest of his life. His openly “derivative” stance as a poet is abundantly evident throughout his work, the key collections being The First Decade, Derivations, The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work. His nuanced prose expositions of his poetics, and occasional comments on other poets, can be found in Fictive Certainties (which reprints The Truth and Life of Myth) and Selected Prose. Despite thirty years’ work on a major prose project, The H.D. Book, it was never completed, though most of the chapters appeared in small magazines during the 60s and 70s.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (b. 1942)
A friendship with George and Mary Oppen had a decisive impact on DuPlessis’s career as a poet and as a scholar. Her scholarly works include an edition of Oppen’s correspondence, books on objectivism, H. D., and other twentieth-century writers, and The Pink Guitar : Writing as Feminist Practice (1990). Installments of her long serial poem Drafts first appeared in Tabula Rosa (1987), were expanded throughout the 1990s, and were gathered into a single volume in 2001. DuPlessis also served on the editorial board of Eshleman’s journal Sulfur.
Eshleman, Clayton (b. 1935)
While living in Japan from 1961 to 1964 Eshleman developed an ongoing association with Gary Snyder. A highly influential promoter of open field poetries as editor of Caterpillar (1967–73) and Sulfur (1981–2000), Eshleman has also received acclaim as a translator (of Césaire, Artaud, and Vallejo, among others). His own poetry began as psychoactive autobiography and grew to include complex meditations on the prehistory of the human imagination, notably in the Paleolithic cave art of the Dordogne (a major prose study, synthesizing decades of firsthand research, is in press). The Paleolithic focus is most concentrated in the poems gathered in Hades in Manganese (1981), Fracture (1983), and Hotel Cro-Magnon (1989)—though the theme continues intermittently in later collections—and there is a useful selection, The Name Encanyoned River : Selected Poems, 1960–1985. There are two substantial collections of essays : Antiphonal Swing (1989) and Companion Spider (2001).
Howe, Susan (b. 1937)
Initially a visual artist, Howe came to poetry later, with Hinge Picture (1974) and The Western Borders (1976). She has maintained a steadfast historical and geographical orientation (colonial New England), explicitly claiming allegiance to Olson’s precedent. Her imaginative critical prose consists of My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The Birth-mark (1993). New Directions began publishing her poetry in 1993 (The Nonconformist’s Memorial) and has issued several volumes since, including a reprint of her earliest titles, Frame Structures (1996). Sun & Moon also reprinted several books in The Europe of Trusts (1990).
Irby, Kenneth (b. 1936)
Kansas informs much of Irby’s poetry, which is intellectually oriented to a sense of open form and geographical space by way of Olson and Dorn. His interest in hermetica has been nourished by his association with Duncan, Kelly, and Lansing, among others. Most of his work has been issued in ephemeral form, from mimeo editions like The Roadrunner Poem (1964), Movements / Sequences (1965), The Flower of Having Passed through Paradise in a Dream (1968), to fine letterpress works like Archipelago (1976), A Set (1983), and Antiphonal and Fall to Fall (1994). The larger collections are Relation (1970), To Max Douglas (1974), Catalpa (1977), Call Steps (1992), and Ridge to Ridge (2001).
Johnson, Ronald (1935–98)
Published early by Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society, Johnson’s work was issued by a large trade publisher in the 1960s (The Book of the Green Man and The Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses). The Black Mountain link is less pronounced than his debt to Zukofsky, particularly evident in the epic Ark (published in 1996, after book-length installments in 1980 and 1984). RADIOS—Johnson’s sculptural retrieval of a new configuration from Paradise Lost—is evidence of his keen eye, along with his books of concrete poetry Songs of the Earth (1970) and Eyes & Objects (1976). He also wrote five cookbooks. At present, little is available except for Peter O’Leary’s thoughtful selection To Do As Adam Did (Talisman House, 2000).
Kelly, Robert (b. 1935)
An early theorist, with Rothenberg, of “deep image,” and a vigorous participant in the post-Black Mountain open field poetry of the 1960s (as editor of Trobar and Matter and contributing editor of Caterpillar), Kelly was also among the most prolific, publishing over twenty books by the time he was forty. His involvement in hermetic lore is notable in Finding the Measure (1967), Songs I—XXX (1968), Flesh Dream Book (1971), as well as in the long narrative poems in The Mill of Particulars (1973) and The Loom (1975), a four-hundred-page culmination of Kelly’s preoccupations to that point. Kelly was among the first poets published by Black Sparrow Press. Publications have continued apace—and in the 80s and 90s Kelly turned increasingly to fiction—but a convenient sampler and overview is Red Actions : Selected Poems, 1960–1993 (1995). A stimulating bibliographic mappa mundi in the Olsonian vein is In Time (1971). Kelly had considerable influence in the late 1960s through a younger generation of writers, many of whom were his students at Bard College, including Charles Stein, Harvey Bialy, Richard Grossinger, Thomas Meyer, Bruce McClelland, George Quasha, and Pierre Joris.
Lansing, Gerrit (b. 1929)
A resident, like Olson, of Gloucester, Lansing is a thoroughly and deliberately esoteric poet. His work has appeared, on the precedent of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in successive editions of the same book : The Heavenly Tree Grows Downard (1966 and 1977), transformed into Heavenly Tree Soluble Forest (1995). His theoretical provocation, “The Burden of Set,” first issued in Lansing’s magazine Set, was reprinted in Caterpillar in 1970 and Io in 1972.
Loy, Mina (1882–1966)
The rehabilitation of Loy’s work—a unique amalgam spanning her association with the Italian Futurists and subsequent participation in New York Dada—is due to Roger Conover, but in this context it’s worth noting that Jargon Society issued Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables in 1958, as well as Conover’s edition of The Last Lunar Baedeker in 1982.
Mackey, Nathaniel (b. 1947)
Much of Mackey’s dissertation, “Call Me Tantra : Open Field Poetics as Muse” (1975), was on Robert Duncan, and his allegiance to Duncan and Olson is evident in Discrepant Engagement (1993), a scholarly work uniquely combining open field poetics with cross-cultural figures like Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite. Coeditor of an anthology on jazz, Moment’s Notice, Mackey’s orientation to African American music is most emphatically addressed in a series of epistolary fictions, Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), and Atet A.D. (2001). His demanding poetry is polymathically informed, most of it consisting of the ongoing serial works “Songs of the Andoumboulou” and “mu.” Several of the “Songs” are performed on a Strick CD with accompanying instrumentalists.
McClure, Michael (b. 1932)
The youngest of the original Beat poets, McClure embodied 1960s counterculture in his poems, plays, and activism and has continued to perform his work in a musical setting with Ray Manzarek of The Doors. The early Meat Science Essays, along with the sound/performance text Ghost Tantras, epitomize McClure’s bio-poetic perspective of the 1960s. Further prose reflections on Beat culture, poetry, ecology, animal rights, and other topics can be found in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982) and Lighting the Corners (1993). New Directions has published his poetry since 1975, and in 1995 Penguin reissued some long poems, including Rare Angel (in Three Poems).
McCord, Howard (b. 1932)
A notable figure of the small press scene, McCord is synecdoche in This Compost for a host of others who, like him, have disappeared from literary sight since the 1970s (Drummond Hadley, James Roller, Keith Wilson, John Oliver Simon, and many more): poets and trekkers, often associated with Gary Snyder or his influence. In a letter appended to Gnomonology (1971), Snyder cautions McCord about his Olsonian bibliomania. His poetry, on the other hand, never belabors his learning. A Selected Poems, 1955–1971 appeared in 1975, culling from collections going back to The Spanish Dark (1964).
Metcalf, Paul (1917–99)
Metcalf was a teen when he met Charles Olson, who was then researching Metcalf’s greatgrandfather, Herman Melville, for Call Me Ishmael. Metcalf later attended Black Mountain College, and Jonathan Williams published many of his books at Jargon, all of which are pioneering infusions of copious research and a rich paratactic sensibility. Inexplicably taken to be a writer of fiction, Metcalf often uses line breaks as focal orientation, begging the difference between poetry and prose. A handsome three-volume edition by Coffee House (1996–97) made all the work conveniently available shortly before Metcalf died.
Niedecker, Lonne (1903–70)
Completely removed from any literary scene, Niedecker lived in rural Wisconsin all her life. A lengthy and substantial correspondence with Zukofsky and Cid Corman led to her publication. My Life by Water Collected Poems, 1936–1968 appeared the year she died. Since then the textual state of her work has been in dispute : collections include Cid Corman’s selection, The Granite Pail (1985, rev. 1986), and Robert Bertholf’s, From This Condensary (1985).
Olson, Charles (1910–70)
Information on Olson is readily available elsewhere. Originally involved in politics, Olson turned to poetry after World War II. His impact on American letters stems from his years at Black Mountain College (1951–56). His polymathic stance as poet-educator continued to inspire younger poets until his death, including George Butterick, thanks to whom the final text of The Maximus Poems was realized, and whose Guide is an exemplary instance of the compost library as habitat.
With Zukofsky and Reznikoff, Oppen was a member of the “Objectivist” Press collective that published his first book, Discrete Series, in 1934. Oppen wrote nothing for several decades, reconvening his poetry career with The Materials (1962) and periodic collections until his death. Of Being Numerous (1968) won the Pulitzer, briefly giving Oppen a notoriety withheld from his peers. His scrupulously moral attention to the balance of words and concepts is evident not only in his poems but in his correspondence (edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 1990).
Palmer, Michael (b. 1943)
Long a resident of San Francisco, where he was close to Robert Duncan, Palmer has more often been cited as a fellow traveler of the Language poetry movement. However, the real range of affiliations is evident in Code of Signals : Recent Writings in Poetics, edited by Palmer in 1983. His earliest books were published by Black Sparrow; and when Jack Shoemaker (of Sand Dollar Books) started North Point Press, the initial poetry publications were by Palmer, Ronald Johnson, and Leslie Scalapino. Palmer’s work has been published by New Directions in the 1990s, including Lion’2s Gate (selected poems), At Passages (1994), and The Promises of Glass (2000).
Rexroth, Kenneth (1905–82)
Autodidact supreme and literary jack-of-all-trades, Rexroth became a resident patron of the Beats in San Francisco in the 1950s and a pioneer of the poetry/jazz performance scene. New Directions published most of his work, including many volumes of essays, poems, and translations (from Japanese and Chinese as well as Greek and French). Rexroth authored a feisty history of American poetry and was an invariably astute observer of literary and other politics. His keen mountaineering outlook and experience, along with his Asian researches, made Rexroth a role model of sorts for Gary Snyder.
Reznikoff, Charles (1894–1976)
Associated with the Objectivists in the 1930s—Oppen, Zukofsky, Rakosi—Reznikoff was a lifelong New Yorker, trained as a lawyer. Jewish heritage contributes much to his work, not only Holocaust (1975) but the shorter work gathered in The Complete Poems (two volumes, 1976–77). Reznikoff’s investigative epic, Testimony, also fills two volumes (over five hundred pages). The scope of his achievement became apparent only at the end of his life when Black Sparrow Press published these titles along with his novels, although New Directions had issued two selections in the 1960s.
Along with Ashbery, Rich is the most esteemed living American poet. Conspicuously associated with political causes, and highly influential as a feminist theorist and activist, her poetry of the past twenty years has integrated her social concerns into a complex ecological and historical vision, and in the process come very far from the first-person formalism of her early work.
Rothenberg, Jerome (b. 1931)
Early associated in New York with Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Armand Schwerner, and Robert Kelly, Rothenberg pioneered a unique blend of the international metropolitan avant-garde and primitive lore and ritual, tendencies that came together in his concept of “ethnopoetics.” He spent several years living on a Seneca reservation, giving pragmatic focus to his interest in Native American culture and serving as immediate background to his anthologies Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin (1972). His editorial labors have been extensive, including the magazines Poems from the Floating World (1960–64), Some I Thing (1965–68), Alcheringa (1970–76), and New Wilderness Letter (1976–85) and nine anthologies, most recent being a two-volume compendium of the twentieth-century avantgarde, Poems for the Millennium, coedited with Pierre Joris. America a Prophecy, coedited with George Quasha, was a fertilizing event in the generation of This Compost. Rothenberg has translated extensively (Garcia Lorca, Schwitters, Picasso, and others), made numerous recordings of collaborative performances, and has published twenty substantial collections of poetry, most of them with New Directions since 1974. A useful gathering of position papers and other prose is Pre-Faces (1981).
Rukeyser, Muriel (1913–80)
Her early success as winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1935 led to a misleading prominence in the postwar period, when she was one of the few consistently anthologized female poets in the United States. But the astutely informed outlook in The Life of Poetry (1949) discloses a polymathic intelligence rivaled, among her peers, only by Olson at that point. By the time of her death she was known as a champion of causes (feminism and the antiwar movement), and the achievement of her poetry aroused little interest until recently, when most of it is out of print. An encouraging exception is Cary Nelson’s inclusion of the complete “Book of the Dead” in his Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford, 2000). Jan Heller Levi’s Muriel Rukeyser Reader includes much of The Life of Poetry in addition to a selection of poems from the whole career.
A protege of Olson, Sanders edited Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts (1962–65) and operated Peace Eye Bookstore in New York (1964–70) while maintaining a career as lyricist and singer for his band, The Fugs—whose exorcism of the Pentagon in 1967 was documented by Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. Sanders is an Egyptophile, richly evident in the subjects and the quirky illustrations of his poems. Investigative Poetry (1976) theorized, for poetry, what he had practiced as an investigative journalist in The Family : The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1971). Sanders’s investigative propensities have led to several large poetry projects, including 1968 (a political history of the republic intertwined with a chronicle of The Fugs’s travels) and America : A History in Verse (two volumes so far).
Schwerner, Armand (1927–99)
With Kelly, Antin, Rothenberg, and Mac Low, Schwerner was originally associated with the New York scene of the early 1960s, a scene notably documented and nurtured by Paul Blackburn. His long-term project The Tablets appeared in five editions from 1968 to 1989, as well as two recordings. The final text appeared posthumously, including a compact disc of Schwerner’s performances. Other significant collections are Seaweed (1969), The Work, the Joy, and the Triumph of the Will (1977), and sounds of the river Naranjana (1983).
Silliman, Ron (b. 1946)
A central promoter of the Language poetry movement and editor of its definitive anthology, In the American Tree (1986), Silliman has consistently made clear his debt to—and preoccupation with—the Black Mountain/New American Poetry heritage. Theoretical speculations can be found in The Age of Huts (1986) and The New Sentence (1987). He was editor of Tottel’s (1970–81) and executive editor of Socialist Review (1986–89)—a political involvement apparent in his poetry, much of which consists of book-length installments of a huge project called The Alphabet. These include Paradise (1985), Lit (1987), What (1988), Toner (1992), Demo to Ink (1992), and N/0 (1994).
Snyder, Gary (b. 1930)
Equally famous and influential for his ecological views and his poetry, Snyder’s career is amply documented elsewhere. In this context I would note his longtime association with the publishing projects (and outlook, too) of Clayton Eshleman and Jerome Rothenberg, and with Naropa and the poetics program there directed by Anne Waldman. Snyder has also been a constant presence in a nexus of western and southwestern poetry, exemplified by Coyote’s Journal, among others. The single most convenient resource is The Gary Snyder Reader (1999), which includes an abundance of essays, poetry, and translations. Mountains and Rivers Without End, his long poem forty years in the making, finally appeared in 1996.
Sobin, Gustaf (b. 1935)
A resident of Provence since 1963, Sobin first published his work under the auspices of Montemora, edited by Eliot Weinberger, a key venture in maintaining some continuity between the New American Poetry impetus of the 60s and its expanding international outlook in the 70s. These were Wind Crysalid’s Rattle (1980) and Celebration of the Sound Through (1982). New Directions subsequently published four books, and Talisman House brought out By the Bias of Sound : Selected Poems, 1974–1994. Sobin’s archaeological interests, much evident in his poetry, resulted in an extensive study, Luminous Debris (1999).
Spicer, Jack (1925–65)
A member of the collaborative Berkeley milieu of the late 40s with Blaser and Duncan, Spicer disavowed his early poetic orientation and undertook the composition of books rather than single poems. The impressive results were gathered posthumously by Blaser in The Collected Books. Key publications during Spicer’s lifetime were After Lorca (1957), The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962), The Holy Grail (1964), and Language (1965). Spicer’s Vancouver lectures of 1965 had a stimulating effect on the poetry community, especially after their transcription in Caterpillar in 1970. A scholarly edition, The House That Jack Built, appeared in 1998, along with a biography by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God : Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Stein, Charles (b. 1944)
Beginning with visits to Olson as a teenager, Stein became part of the circle associated with Robert Kelly in the 60s. Author of a study of Olson’s use of Jung, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum, Stein himself gradually followed the path of serial form : theforestforthetrees is the title of this project now underway for two decades, from which The Hat Rack Tree (1994) is a selection. Earlier poetry titles include Poems and Glyphs (1972), Witch-Hazel (1975), Horse Sacrifice (1980), and Parts and Other Parts (1982). Stein’s practice as a Buddhist has been an important feature of his poetry, as it has for other practicing Buddhists like Schwerner, Snyder, and Waldman.
Director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968 to 1978, Waldman was also cofounder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still works. The variety of poetic practices nurtured at Naropa are much in evidence in the two volumes coedited with Marilyn Webb, Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute (1978–79), and in Disembodied Poetics (1994), coedited with Andrew Schelling. Waldman’s own output is prodigious, and after Fast Talking Woman (1975) she became widely known for her invigorating performances. The two-volume Iovis (1993, 1997) is indebted to Ed Sanders’s advocacy of “investigative poetry,” transfigured through Waldman’s performative sensibility, her richly informed cross-cultural awareness, and her extensive travels.
Williams, Jonathan (b. 1929)
As a student at Black Mountain College, Williams started Jargon Society, publishing the first installment of Olson’s Maximus Poems. Jargon has continued sporadically over the years, proving particularly supportive of the work of Paul Metcalf. Williams’s own poetry is occasional in the best sense, and the occasions can be expansive, as in Mahler (1969), his book-length poetic response to the complete symphonies.
Zukofsky, Louis (1904–78)
Famously championed by Ezra Pound, with whom he had an extensive correspondence, Zukofsky edited An “Objectivists” Anthology in 1932, including work by George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, and Kenneth Rexroth. The “Objectivists” initially formed to promote and publish the then neglected work of William Carlos Williams. Zukofsky had a fastidious and concise literary career, spending fifty years on the long poem “A”; producing a philosophical study of Shakespeare, Bottom (1963); a textbook/anthology, A Test of Poetry (1948); a translation, with wife Celia, of the complete poems of Catullus (1969); as well as plays and stories. Complete Short Poetry (1991) reprints everything outside “A” (including Catullus). Zukofsky carried on a long correspondence with Lorine Niedecker and has been frequently cited as mentor and role model by other poets, including Creeley, Duncan, Kelly, Johnson, and Silliman.