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Preface
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface This Compost combines several functions in one. It is an anthology of sorts, concentrating on the Black Mountain lineage in modern American poetry, though with plenty of related extracts going back to Whitman and Dickinson. But anthologies invariably reflect judgments of taste, and This Compost neither argues the priority of, nor attempts to canonize, a particular set of poets. Insofar as I take poetry to be something more than the exercise of aesthetic self-expression, there are tacit limits to the poets included here. Robert Creeley reports Allen Ginsberg urging, "You don't really have to worry about writing a good poem any more, you can write what you want to" (Faas, 187). While Creeley overestimates will, the peculiar energy I find in the poets in This Compost is their willingness to work outside prevailing literary sensibility. Often the very look of the poems discloses a sculptural address, or a kinetic choreography attentive to organism, not decorum. Asa compendium of extracts, this book does not validate aesthetic claims commonly made in literary criticism so much as document a stance toward the living planet, a stance these poets share with many people who know nothing of poetry. Despite its length, This Compost is also an essay. There are no chapters as such; rather, the headings indicate topoi in the old rhetorical sense: sites of excavation and deliberation. While they are arranged to be read chronologically, the method is somewhat circular, so the reader will find certain topoi recurring in a seasonal rotation. Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page because I write that way; I favor a bifocal prospect, atavistic residue perhaps of hunting and tracking instincts. Ed Sanders says "A footnote is a dangling data-cluster" and compares it to a mobile by Alexander Calder. I like the quadruped diagram Sanders provides ("The Art of the Elegant Footnote," in Thirstingfor Peace in a Raging Century, 162). xi Xll P R E F A C E As an exercise in ecological solidarity with the materialsit conveys, This Compost practices what it preaches in that most of the citations of poetry are not identified in the text, but blended into polyphonic configurations. Sometimes what is given as a single poetic citation is assembled from several poets or poems—although different extracts are always indicated by a marker (~) at the right-hand margin. All sources from books of poetry are clearly identified at the end of the book, in the citations chapter (pp.201-2). Quoted prose, on the other hand,isidentified parenthetically in the text. (Citation from prose poems complicates matters; but if no reference is given in the text, you can bet it's a prose poem referenced in the citations chapter.) I have taken the liberty ofnot citing pre-twentieth-century workby page number, since there are so manyeditions. But the originals—fromEmerson's prose, Whitman's poetry, or early modern authors like Thomas Browne—tend to be concise or conveniently divided. So extracts from Whitman are identified by section numbers (in the numbering ofWhitman's final "deathbed" edition), and in the case of prose writers I provide chapter or section indicators. The origins of my citational practice are also the origins of This Compost in that I initially noticed thematic congruencies specific to some primary books published in 1960—The Distances by Charles Olson and The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan—which led to comparisonswith work byJack Spicer and Louis Zukofsky, among others. The notion of "composition by field" carried obvious implications of compost, which led me to the concept of "necropoetics" developed here byway of Whitman. The notion of a "compost library" arose when I began carefully placing certain extracts side by side without authorial distinction. It's worth recalling that this tactic wasalso indebted to those influential if too easily misconstrued essays by Roland Barthes ("The Death of the Author") and Michel Foucault ("What Is an Author?"), along with the notion of intertextuality developed byJulia Kristeva and Barthes.*Eventually, I recognized the implications for a body of poetry written in and for a community, however loosely defined. Readership was tan- * These long-familiar works had a tremendously fertilizing impact for certain communities of American poets as they were translated. Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text was the subject of a symposium (in the older Greek sense of a quasi-Bacchanale) in my magazine Wch Way (1975). "The Death of the Author" appeared in Stephen Heath's collection of essays by Barthes,Image...