PARTISAN REVIEW
101
years and in which all revolutions are engulfed and lost. . . . The
word is an element./ The word is a material./ The word is an ob–
ject./ Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk and the
foliage are the visible aspects of a tree. . . .
If
the material is spirit,
RIm
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we must let it work; the work of the painter and the poet will
consist in making it ... present." For Emmett Williams,
in
typically breezy American fashion stressing the movement's play–
fulness, "material meant material to me, and i felt that
i
could
do anything i wanted to with it. collage it, paint it over, isolate
every detail and look at it that way, throw
A
it together at random, put it together ac-
cording to a strict system. . . ." And as Ian ••. b
I
u e boa
t
Hamilton Finlay suggests with his usual a b row n
5
a
i
I
angelic tact, "one does not want a
glitter-
ing
perfection which forgets that the world
LIT T L
E
is, after all, also to be made by man into
his
home,"
yet" 'concrete' by its very limi- a b row n boa t
.
ff
·bI·
fda g r e ens a
i
I
tations
0
ers a tangl e lIDage
0
goo ness
and sanity.... It is a model, of order,
TOP
U
T
even if set in a space which is full of
doubt."
a green boat
Historically, the movement goes from a b
I
a c k
5
a
i
I
birth pangs to vigorous adolescence with
shocking suddenness. Its method occurs
YOU
R
EYE
S
marginally in the past: Herbert's altar or
Easter wings, the mouse's tail in
Alice,
for a b
I
a c k boa
t
example. "Modernism" makes straight the a b
I
u e
5
a
i
I
way. Abruptly in the 19508, as if one
TO
S LEE P
threw a switch on some previously pre-
pared global network, men on four con-
a ...
tinents more or less independently begin
to make these little objects that speak to
LIT T L
E .••
each other across the crust of the world.
Judging by the conversion experiences many of them have re–
corded in the guise of rationales, several factors operated. Old
forms were boring in themselves. They were imprisoning and
could not avoid bearing false witness. They were overly personal
where the poets wanted to divest themselves of ego. They failed to
