Longer Views (38 page)

Poems suggest a vision of the world. And finally that vision turns around to place its own analytical grid before an image of the self that perceives.

The world of The Alphabet has a surprising material specificity, a social saturation, and an observational intelligence that is as concerned with the world as it is with the word.

And the poetic subject of The Alphabet?

It is not the subject unified by consistent and coherent narrative strategies. It is a subject that is, one suspects in those moments where formal patterns are intuitable, obsessively intrigued by system; but it is still a poetic subject who refuses to present him- or herself as outside history via the move of closing or completing an easily masterable system that, through the obvious gesture of closure, steps beyond historical consideration. It is a subject whose units both of perception and action are perceived as no larger than single sentences—axioms, grasps, insights, seizures, exhortations, visions.

Silliman's criticism (e.g.,
The New Sentence
, Roof Books, New York, 1989; or “Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared,” in
The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy
, Charles Bernstein, ed., Roof Books, New York, 1990) tells us that there is nothing passive about such a poetic subject. Indeed, Silliman is the most passionate and persuasive polemicist I know of writing today. If anything, the rigorous anargumentative limits he has set on his poetic enterprise, most forcefully dramatized throughout the thirteen sections I have so far seen of The Alphabet, seems to have provided him with an explosively political arsenal of argumentative material.

Certainly the most systematic of poets (the sentence collections in succeeding sections of
Ketjak
, for example, expand by a strict Fibonacci series), Silliman is nevertheless a systematician of a very different sort from the ones modernism taught us how to read.

Most sensitive poetry readers would probably consider it near-sacrilege, say, to juggle significantly the order of
The Cantos
, the variously dated sections of “
A
” or the sub-poems that make up
Passages
. But while, at the level of system,
Demo to Ink
is clearly the “second” book of The Alphabet and “follows”
ABC
, an actual reader of the poem, even while he or she might idly wonder if the exigencies of small press poetry publishing were such that the
Demo to Ink
parts were, indeed, written right after “Albany,” “Blue,” and “Carbon,” and simply had to wait this long to see print, will still probably not sense any loss of enjoyment from the fact that she or he read other sections first; and that is specifically because we are not excluded from Silliman's system, even when we're not sure what it is—not in the same way that even the momentary inability to access some part of the background intellectual arma- menterium of the great high modernist monologues, no matter how much we're impressed by them, still excludes us; and that exclusion, absent in Silliman, is still the esthetic aspect of the process by which an establishment excludes the oppressed from history.

This is not poetry as personal adventure made public. Rather this is poetry as what civilized people do—and what civilized people interested in the language of the tribe ought from time to time to take a look at, get interested in, and enjoy. But the cumulative effect of thirty, forty, seventy-five pages of Silliman's work communicates a passion in his exploration/construction of the labyrinths of language as great as—if not greater than—any personal adventure I know of in our epoch.

46. Coleridge begins Chapter Five of his 1817
Biographia Literaria
with this observation: “There have been men in all ages who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seemed to have formed on the principal of the absence or presence of the will.” One must smile as one sees Coleridge himself eminently characterizable in such a way. Whether it is a universal trait or not, certainly it is a Romantic one. And a hundred-ten years later, in his famous
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière
, Antonin Artaud might easily have gone to school at Coleridge's feet, anent precisely this point, as he demands that Rivière enlighten him as to whether or not Artaud's own form of madness—a collapsing will that prevents him from ever bringing a poem to the perfection demanded
by the esthetic of the “unified impression”—can consort with valid, literary creativity.

Is it too gross an observation that writers who are likely to make their personality problems a center for their writerly investigations are the ones whose problem impedes their writing? Certainly there are other writers who are not about to make their own personality problems the center of their intellectual delving. I mean those of us who, in spite of good intentions and common sense, must write. I mean those of us who, sunk in myriad hypochondriachal anxieties and a-swirl in cosmi-comical doubts, move to the typewriter to record a few and by so doing escape so many more. I mean those of us who, when all logic, all our friends, and all the circumstances of our person and the world say (and say truly), you would be a lot better off if you didn't write but rather did X, Y, or Z, find ourselves picking up a notebook and starting to put down words—and keep at it for hours, for days on end . . . It still can make me cry to remember my daughter, aged three, running up to me at my desk, tugging at my knee to entreat me, “Daddy! Daddy, don't write!”—or can simply embarrass me to recall wife one year or lover another passing through the next room with angry steps, while, for the tenth hour of the third day, I sat at the typewriter. This, at any rate, is a problem the contemporary writer is going to hide, going to hope at worst is ignored or at best turned into a virtue by those who come after; but it's the last problem the writer is going to probe, interrogate, and whose solution he or she will seek to turn into a carefully articulated field for philosophical adventure. But, with its attendant absent-mindedness, preoccupation, and chronic personality absence, this problem causes far more pain, I'm sure, than the other—whether or not it is connected in any way to talent.

47. Certainly I would like it said of me, as it was once said of Maurice Ravel: He had no secret except the secret of his genius. But what we all fear is that time's judgment will turn out to be: He had no secrets at all.

—
Amherst/New York
March/April 1992

 

*
Kathryn Cramer points out that if three or four of the men (and, to be fair, the young woman herself) each had been willing to have a leg amputated at the hip, they might easily have compensated for the hundred-ten, hundred-twenty pounds involved. But this, she goes on to point out, would amount to symbolic castration and thus be far too distressing within the story's symbolic framework.

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,—this strong, solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of the cities to the Atlantis . . . He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.

—Emerson, “Plato”

A reading at once sophisticated and rich—of a poem as complex as
The Bridge
—must start with details and distinctions: the realization, perhaps, that, in Crane's case, even if they started off one, by the end of his poem, Cathay and Atlantis do not allegorize the same notion: Cathay was the mistaken goal from which Columbus, on his first voyage to the New World, returned, and, after three more, one of which was a major colonization push with 17 ships and 1500 colonists, died unaware he had not found.

Atlantis was the goal of Crane's own vision.

In 1922 Harold Hart Crane first read Eliot's
The Waste Land
in that November's
Dial
and conceived his own poem as an answer to Eliot's that would offer—without any particular jingoistic pretensions—a specifically American affirmation to counter Eliot's presumably international despair. Crane worked in spurts, on
The Bridges
“Finale” and other poems, that year and the next, around his job at J. Walter Thompson's Advertising Agency, where his accounts included Pine Tar Honey,
Sloan's Liniment, and, yes, Naugahyde. Possibly after an incident in which the hung-over Crane threw a lot of perfume out the office window, he quit Thompson's in October 1923, to spend November and December with sculptor Gaston Lachaise's stepson John Nagle and writer William Slater Brown at the Rector house in Woodstock, New York.

There, while visiting one evening, Woodstock resident and art critic William Murrell Fisher told Crane about the Viennese-born poet Samuel Bernhard Greenberg (December 13th, 1893-August 16th, 1917), sixth of the eight children and youngest son to Jacob and Hannah Greenberg.

An embroiderer specializing in gold and silver, largely for religious purposes, Jacob Greenberg had brought his family to New York's Lower East Side when Samuel was four or five. The family moved frequently about the city's Jewish neighborhood, while during the week Samuel attended Public School 166 at Rivington Street and Suffolk and on Saturdays Hebrew school. Hannah died on February 19th, 1908, and was buried in a Brooklyn cemetery. On the chill funeral day, the family rode back home in a wagon—across the Brooklyn Bridge. Between 1909 and 1911 Samuel lived with his older brother Daniel. In 1910, through his older brother Morris, Samuel met a circle of musicians and artists, including art-critic Fisher, who worked at or were connected with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Daniel and Morris were both serious piano students.)

From 1911 on, Samuel lived with Morris—when not hospitalized: Between Spring and Autumn of 1912, while working in his older brother Adolf's leather bag shop, Samuel was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Three days after the first of the year in 1913, Jacob died. For six or seven weeks starting in May that year, Samuel was hospitalized at the Montefiore Home, after which he stayed a month or so with his sister's family in Westerly, Rhode Island, convalescing and working for his brother-in-law in a horse-drawn wagon selling piece goods in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Back in New York, he pursued his writing, painting, and music—when not working at Adolf's, visiting his friends at the Metropolitan, or going with them to concerts or coffee shops. After seven hospitalizations over four years, early on a muggy summer's evening in mid-August, 1917, Samuel died, age twenty-three, in the paupers' hospital on Ward's Island.

After Samuel's death, older brother Morris Greenberg gave Fisher five of his younger brother's notebooks. Morris entrusted them to Fisher in hopes that his younger brother's art critic friend might get his brother's poems published—which Fisher did, after a fashion: A year after Greenberg's death, he printed Greenberg's poem “The Charming Maiden” in a magazine edited out of Woodstock,
The Plowshare
of June 1918.

Two and a half years later, in the January 1920 issue, writing under his professional name, William Murrell, Fisher wrote and published an eight-page appreciation and memoir of the young poet, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre”—followed by a selection of ten of Greenberg's poems.

On that winter evening in Woodstock, three years later in 1923, fascinated by Fisher's account of Greenberg and his poetry, Crane arranged to borrow the five Greenberg notebooks in Fischer's possession—at least one of which was a leather-bound, book-sized album, with marbled endpapers (that had belonged to someone named Sidney in 1898, for that is the name and date written in pencil and later erased from the first page, though legible even today), and which Greenberg had half-filled with neat fair copies of his poems for 1913 and 1914. On 19 sheets of yellow foolscap, Crane typed out forty-two of Greenberg's poems. (Unbeknownst to Fisher or Crane at the time, Daniel Greenberg had preserved another thirty-five pocket notebooks, memorandum pads, and sketchbooks, as well as fugitive papers belonging to his younger brother: these contained, among more memorable items, drafts of a letter from a hospital, more poems, miniature portraits of Fisher and Halprin, as well as various Jewish men seated on benches about the Lower East Side, a stunning view north through the crossed cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a sketch of the Judson Church tower done from Washington Square in summer.) Slater Brown recalls Crane actually taking Greenberg's manuscripts back to New York City on the train with them a little after Christmas; but, as Fisher remembers Crane's returning them just before leaving Woodstock, Brown is probably confusing Crane's own typescripts with the originals.

We'll digress for a few more pages, because, even though they never met, Samuel Greenberg is still an important and poignant figure in the Hart Crane story.

After a page-and-a-half divagation on the differences between the romantic view and the realistic view of the relation between poverty and the artist, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre” goes on:

The case of Samuel Bernhard Greenberg is exceptionally affecting, both in the sudden flowering of his gift and in the pathos of his end: for it is indeed remarkable that a boy of no education or advantages should write such beautiful lyrics as he has done, and it is a sad reflection on our appreciation and hospitality that he died in a public institute for destitute consumptives . . . Greenberg's brief story is interesting: born in Vienna of Austrian-Jewish parentage, he was brought to New York when a child, and after a few months in the public schools was put to work in a leather goods factory. At the age of
seventeen his inherited tendency to consumption had been so fostered by the dust and confinement of the leather shop that he was told he was too weak to be of any further service there. Then began what he pathetically referred to later as his “freedom” and his “education.”