92
PARTISAN REVIEW
Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan on the West Coast.
In
the novel there were
Kerouac and Burroughs . And there were many others . A poet as different
from the preceding figures as A.R. Ammons is very much like them with
respect to his use of experience, especially in his book-length poem,
A Tape
for the Turn of the Year.
Poetic closure became relatively unimportant .
Letters, journals, and collaborations became important forms . Tape re–
cording became a significant technique in various arts-I remember the
composer Steve Reich telling me the tape recorder was the characteristic
medium of the decade . Improvisation was crucial (Kerouac: "Begin not
from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of
interest in subject of image at
moment
of writing " ). Like improvisation ,
collage was also crucial as a way of making fresh contact with experience .
There was a more direct relation with experience as it registers on the self
without the mediation of a priori form, and a correspondingly increased
importance of the presence of the self in the work . One felt the need to
incorporate the vagaries of experience, its randomness, its arbitrariness, to
affirm the experience of composition, and to deny the work as illusion, so
that while we admitted the brokenness, the discontinuity of experience , we
also swept away many of the chronic schizoid Western attitudes toward
mind and experience, thought and poetry, form and chaos, and we gave
to
our works the only structure that seemed possible or even desirable-the
structure of our own minds .
If
another kind of structure seemed possible, it
was the structure of the arbitrary, a way of moving from the meditated
to
the unpremeditated , as in Burrough 's' 'cut up" method, of allowing' 'more
of the world to enter into the
ar~"
(one notes already in Stevens this alterna–
tion between arbitrary forms and forms that reflect the dynamic of his
ongoing imagination). Diane Wakoski, one of the important poets in this
line , recently made the following comment on this aesthetic, which I quote
while taking exception
to
her organicllife style:invention/craft opposition
and her comment on fiction :
Those of us writing poetry today are doing so on a series of formal
premises which may
be
different from anything in the past. One of
those premises is that the work must organically
come
out of the writer 's
life . We do not believe very much in "invented" literature any more.
Or we consider it entertainment. Neither serious or interesting art . We
have some difficulty dealing with the idea that a man could sit down
and decide to write , say, a sonnet or a villanelle and turn out a poem
that would really be interesting to anyone . Even technically or perhaps
especially
technically, because what we are interested in is how the writer
reaches through the content of his life, his ideas, his emotions, and his
own personality to create a form for expressing all of this.... We no
longer accept the premise that a novelist can invent people or stories
