608 The American Century: Literature since 1945taint of self-consciousness, no compulsion to look before or after. They act with
purity, simplicity, and instinctive courage, as part of the processes of creation. To live
beyond evasions and inwardness: this is the lesson taught by the waterbirds. For that
matter, it is the lesson taught by Everson’s tough yet oracular poetry, which represents
a sustained assault on the idea of a separate self – and which is insistently reminding
us of the “strict conformity that creaturehood entails, / ... the prime commitment
all things share.”
“I would like to make poems out of real objects,” another poet associated with the
San Francisco area, Jack Spicer (1925–1965), declared in “Letter to Lorca” (1957);
“... The poems is a collage of the real.” This sounds like Ferlinghetti and Everson, in
their commitment to what Williams called “things – on a field”; and Spicer does
certainly share with those poets an interest in the irreducible reality of objects as well
as a preference for open-ended structures and a flexible line – in effect, the poem as
process. Just as Ferlinghetti and Everson are not entirely alike, however, Spicer is
different from both of them in that his commitment (as the phrase “collage of the
real” intimates) is to a more surreal medium; the materials of his work seem to come
from the subconscious, even though the organizing of those materials is achieved by
a conscious poetic intelligence. His “Imaginary Elegies” (1957), for instance, begin
by asking if poetry can mean that much if all it deals with is visible phenomena,
“like a camera,” rendering them “alive in sight only for a second.” Then working
through a complex association of imagery Spicer answers his own question simply
by dramatizing his own sense of the potentials of poetry. “This much I’ve learned,”
Spicer says, “... / Time does not finish a poem” because a poem is a fluid, changing
medium that actively imitates the equally fluid, changing stream of life. It is a matter,
not of perception, but of correspondence; “Poet, / be like God,” Spicer commands;
that is, create “not ... an image or a picture but ... something alive – caught forever
in the structure of words.” This alertness to poetry as active translation, a carrying
across of “real objects” called things into other “real objects” called words, also
characterizes the writing of another poet from the Bay Area, Philip Lamantia
(1927–2005). Lamantia claimed that he “broke with surrealism in 1946,” but it is
clear that, like Spicer, he retained the essential surrealist quality of revealing the
inner life via explosive patterns of imagery. So, his work, gathered in volumes like
Erotic Poems (1946), Eustasis (1959), and Meadowland West (1986), uses disjunctive
rhythms and an ecstatic tone, as well as kaleidoscopic images to create feelings of
dread or rapture – sometimes religious, and sometimes inspired by drugs.
A similar extremism is to be found in the work of two other poets more loosely
associated with the Bay Area, Philip Whalen (1923–2002) and Michael McClure
(1932–). “This poetry,” McClure said of his writing in 1959, “is a picture or graph of
a mind moving,” and his poem “The Same Old Jazz” (1957) shows what he means.
For him, as he insists in this piece, there is “A one-to-one relationship” between
inner and outer, “The world inside my head and the cat outside the window.” His
aim is to dramatize that relationship: to write a kind of abstract expressionist diary
in which abrupt, syncopated rhythms, a pacey idiom, and images that are continually
deliquescing into other images are all harnessed to the recreation of experience as aGGray_c05.indd 608ray_c 05 .indd 608 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM