Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments each of the essays in this book was written for and to an occasion. Consequently , they do not as a whole pursue a central argument or explicit thesis that might pull them together into a coherent and interlocking whole. they do not attempt to cover a particular (or even a general) field. they were not written with a collection in mind, nor a book. Gathered together, as here, there is not only an ad hoc quality to their assemblage but, inevitably, a recurrence of names, citations, themes, and quotations that reveal some of the constants in my reading and delight—work by Basil Bunting,William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. the nature of literary authority is a recurrent but intermittent motif. such is the nature of occasion that inclusion and omission are in part simply a matter of happenstance: the occasion for some possible essays simply didn’t arise, or my efforts were simply inadequate. there are not, for instance, as many essays on women writers as i would have liked, and some pieces—on rachel Blau duplessis,Kathleen Fraser,or rosmarieWaldrop—were too slight for inclusion. other omissions, such as the perhaps surprising lack of anything about robert duncan, result from slightly different circumstance: in the case of duncan, the process of editing his collected poems, along with the fairly long introductory essays to the two volumes of his work, tempered my appetite for writing yet another. there is also the thought that with the long-delayed publication of The H. D. Book, the two volumes of his Collected Poems and Plays, and the Collected Prose, duncan is becoming canonical and the need for the sort of essay i customarily write is less. i encountered a similar situation years before when i went to write about William Carlos Williams. Like duncan, Williams (and, later, olson) opened doors for me— Williams is for me the wellhead (i came to ezra pound much later)—but by the time i began to attempt an essay (in the mid-1960s) he was rapidly becoming viii acknowledgments canonical, and i found myself irresistibly drawn to the sometimes crumpled syntax of Louis Zukofsky. Questions are more engaging than answers. i have brought references up-to-date where it seemed more or less urgently necessary, and generally made slight revisions in the interests of clarity or even grace.i warmly thank Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer for their strong and patient encouragement to gather these essays into a book, and stephen Collis, who, once i’d gathered the essays, gave them an initial and extremely useful copyedit, thereby saving me the expenditure of a lot of energy during a period when i was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by too many commitments . Marjorie perloff read the whole manuscript, made detailed and useful suggestions at both local and global levels, and wisely urged me to write the introduction; i owe her much. the essays in this book were written between 1989 and 2006. the first to be written, “Canonical strategies and the Question of authority: t. s. eliot and William Carlos Williams,” was delivered in much-abridged form at the tri-University Conference, simon Fraser University, 4 March 1989. it has not previously been printed. “Basil Bunting: poet of the north” is the text of a lecture given in March 1990 at the University of durham, england; it was originally published as a chapbook by the Basil Bunting poetry archive in 1990. i am grateful indeed to the Basil Bunting poetry Center at durham University for appointing me as its first Mountjoy Fellow, and for the opportunity this afforded me to work in the substantial archive of Bunting materials in the Mountjoy collection . the late richard Caddel and diana Collecott of the Basil Bunting poetry Centre deserve my special thanks, as do tony downes of the society of Fellows at durham University and Judith draycott of english estates north. i also owe warm thanks to ann Caddel for valuable comments on historical matters, and to Karen Jackson for providing me with a welcome bolt-hole from the not-inconsiderable rigors of dormitory life in Collingwood College . david Burnett and Beth rainey of durham University Library were constantly courteous and patient, steering me through the intricacies of the archive and the local history collection, and i thank them. i must add that without the considerable support of english estates north, Basil Bunting’s papers would not have stayed in the north of england, where they belong. a somewhat different...