602 The American Century: Literature since 1945poets who shared at least some of his aims. They and a few others found an outlet for
their work in Origin and then later Black Mountain Review (1954–1957). As a result,
they have become associated as a group: a loose constellation of people who, for a
while at least, found in Olson a guide, example, and father figure. These poets include
Jonathan Williams (1929–2008), whose Jargon Press became an important publisher
of avant-garde writing, and Denise Levertov (1923–1997), an Englishwoman who
emigrated to America – where, she claimed, she found “new rhythms of life and
speech,” and was transformed into “an American poet.” “These poems decry and
exalt” Williams said of his work, in An Ear in Bartram’s Tree: Selected Poems 1957–67
(1969); and he added elsewhere that “being a mountaineer,” he had “a garrulous
landscape nature” and yet at times could be “as laconic ... as a pebble.” Whether
sprawling or succinct, though, satiric or lyrical, his poems are marked by their radical
innovations of language and line (“Credo”), their affection for the Appalachian
Mountains and English rural landscapes (“Reflections from Appalachia,” “Two
Pastorals for Samuel Palmer at Shoreham, Kent”), and by a constant desire to see “not
with / but thru / the eye!” – to couple perception with vision. Levertov had a similar
obsession with seeing, coupling this with the use of open forms and idiomatic
language. However, for her, as she admitted in “The Third Dimension” (1956),
“Honesty / isn’t so simple.” She tends to be more deliberate, painstaking, more hesitant
in her unraveling of theme. The poetic “I” here is quieter, more tentative. It involves,
as she put it in “Beyond the End” (1953), “a gritting of teeth” in order “to go / just that
much further, beyond the end / beyond whatever end: to begin, to be, to defy.”
Two other poets whose work has registered the impact of the Black Mountain
experience are Paul Blackburn (1926–1971) and John Wieners (1934–2002). Wieners
studied at the college briefly, Blackburn published work in Origin and the Review;
and both poets acknowledged the influence of Olson – which would in any event be
clear from their use of the poem as an open field, their preoccupation with “breath”
and typographical experiment. It is there, however, that the resemblance ends.
Blackburn is much the more expansive, outgoing of the two. His poem
“The Continuity” (1953), for example, begins as an overheard conversation
(“The bricklayer tells the busdriver / and I have nothing to do but listen”), moves
into a skillful imitation of street speech (“Th’ holdup at the liquor store, d’ja hear?”),
and then concludes with a celebration of community. “A dollar forty – / two that
I spent ...,” the poet says, “/ is now in a man’s pocket going down Broadway.”
“Thus far the transmission is oral,” he adds, referring to the conversation he has just
heard: exchanges financial, conversational, literary, are all a way of maintaining
“the continuity.” They are all acts of communion, no matter how small, and that
includes this poem. The work of John Wieners – who came to prominence with
The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) – could not be more opposed to this idea of
communality: he even referred to public poetry reading as “a shallow act.” For him,
an audience was a dangerous thing, a “wild horde who press in / to get a peek at the
bloody hero,” and seemed not only to violate but to feed off his privacy. Intense,
edgy, his poetry withdraws from nightmare landscapes (“America, you boil over /
The cauldron scalds”) and presses in upon his inner life: where, however, he discoversGGray_c05.indd 602ray_c 05 .indd 602 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM