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open-ended at the beginning as well as the end:
Paterson
and the
Cantos
make fullest sense if read as expansive continuations of what
the author was doing in his earlier, shorter poems. They can also be
broken up into assemblages of shorter poems, like this one from Zukofsky's
section 5 :
An animate still-life
-
night.
Leaves, autumn.
Thread the middle.
A cigarette,
Leaf-edge, burning
obliquely urban,
the branches of tree air comfort.
Yet it would be wrong to think of Pound, Williams or Zukofsky as
simply packing a number of perfect small imagist poems in a kind of
loose conglomerate of assertion and anecdote. A certain sense of trem–
bling and dangerous continuity, like soft stuff catching on to the next
rock and becoming a thread or a nerve, makes the reading of such long
poems, in this new style, peculiarly exciting, the reader himself becom–
ing the constructor. Zukofsky's own essays will be an indispensable text
for whoever does undertake the really hard thinking that will be neces–
sary to see how imagism, a cult partly of the very short, the very de–
personalized or objective poem, could result in the end in extremely
long, personal and subjective poems of a quite new kind.
It
seems to
me that even
now
we can only call attention to the kind, and some
of its more broadly obvious characteristics. We still completely lack an
accurate and detailed enough description of the aesthetics of such a
poem to form a set of prescriptive rules either for writing it or judging
it, or even for being more than hesitantly sure that our own judgments
about whether parts of such an at once organic and ramshackle whole
work or don't work are not mainly subjective. Zukofsky, Pound, Wil–
liams all hated the stuffier kind of academic scholarship, but a really
rigorous academic examination is what they now deserve and need.
Creeley and Dugan, the two younger American poets for whom
I feel wholehearted admiration, don't, partly because they write short
and direct poems, need such a circuitous attention. I feel Dugan in
this third volume is more wily and hasn't anything with the frighten–
ing force of his great poem, in
Poems
2, about sharks. Almost a kind
of charm, a winsomeness is developing, and it disconcerts one: also a
kind of new emotional distance from" the material which makes a poise
between benevolence, self-irony and the danger of indifference. Yet here
is a good poem, I think, plain diction and through-thrust logical construc–
tion, but does something go wrong, a sort of stumble in the last stanza,
