Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

Listening In

208 Avocations Listening In Hayden Carruth’s The Sleeping Beauty “The great contribution of the twentieth century to art is the idea of spontaneous improvisation within a determined style, a style comprising equally or inseparably both conventional and personal elements. What does this mean? It means a great deal more than the breakup of traditional prosody or rules of composition, as announced in 1910 by Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso. It means the final abandonment of the neo-classical idea of structure as a function of form, which the romantics and post-romantics of the nineteenth century had never given up. Instead structure has become a function of feeling.” So saith Hayden Carruth in a marvelous essay on Pee Wee Russell and Willie Yeats collected with other poems and essays in Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics (University of Iowa Press, 1986). “Form,” Robert Creeley observes, “is never more than an extension of content.” Which Denise Levertov clarifies, “Form is the revelation of content.” Carruth’s idea of structure as a function of feeling (especially in jazz and poetry) enlarges and clarifies something that has been at the center of critical philosophical debate for most of twentieth century. Picasso’s cubism grew out of his study of African art as surely as the blues grew out of African music transplanted in the New World. And the idea of spontaneous improvisation within a determined style or form is at least as old as the Shih Ching, the Poetry Classic Confucius compiled 2500 years ago. Perhaps the greatest literary contribution of the Sung dynasty a thousand years ago is the elevation of tzu, a verse-form wherein the poet composes new lyrics for a pre-existing tune. The form reached its pinnacle in the poetry of Li Ch’ing-chao. But the structure of the poem was an externally fixed form based upon musical measure—new lyrics composed for pre-existing tunes. Carruth is seeking a structure from within—spontaneous and self-articulating. “Genius, “ William Blake said, opening English poetry to a whole universe found in a grain of sand, “is not lawless.” Ezra Pound insisted that the line in poetry be composed “by the musical phrase and not by the metronome.” Hayden Carruth, that perennial jazz aficionado and compulsive “woodshedder” with his clarinet, understands Pound’s dictum probably as well as anyone presently writing poetry in the U. S. of A. “Improvisation, “ Carruth says elsewhere in the same book, “is the privilege of the master, the bane of the apprentice. It is the exercise of sensibility in acquired knowledge. When it becomes too often repeated, either in the work of the master or later in that of his followers, it loses spontaneity, because nothing of freshness is happening, and then it is over. Done. . . . Improvisation then is composition, but composition impelled by knowledgeable spirit. . .” And what is the spirit of a master? And how does the poem arise from one’s deepest and most sincere practice? A composition impelled by knowledgeable spirit? It might take the form of poetry by Robert Duncan, or by Denise Levertov, the former still read only by a handful of poets, the latter rather grudgingly granted status as a major poet by a fickle, ignorant public. That we prefer the simple and immediately recognizable in all things can be seen perfectly clearly in the rise of the national fast food chain, in best seller lists, in the idiocy of American television and movie-star politicians, in atrocious pop music fads, and in our poetry anthologies. The “knowledgeable spirit” arises out of long-standing practice of “woodshedding ” what Duncan called “the scales of the marvelous,” or by seeking what Carruth has called “wisdom that is the ghost of wisdom, otherwise called humility before one’s task.” One primary major task of the poet is to bring the whole of one’s life into the presence of disciplined improvisation within a measure, whether that measure be fixed from within or without, or whether that measure is spontaneously variable, as in the case of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot,” which brought Charles Olson to observe that “a foot is for kicking.” “To break the back of the iamb, that was the first heave.” —E.P. Well . . . It sagged, it bent . . . but it didn’t break. And it won’t break as long as we choose to place greater stress upon one syllable than upon another with any degree of regularity or identifiable pattern: the...