RONALD SUKENICK
without putting himself into them. We no longer believe that there is
something called' 'the craft of poetry" which is apart from the life style
of the poet.... I'd like
to ...
make a case for the excitement in
literature being an extension of the writer's life , rather than a transcend–
ing of or an escape from his reality .
93
Extension rather than transcendence. If we say that' 'content" is the writer's
experience (memories, researches, readings, activities, indigestions, imag–
inings, neuroses, opinions, and the act of composition), then Wakoski's
commentary makes perfect sense of Creeley's formulation that "form is an
extension of content. " The poem is not different from experience, it is more
experience . If this is so then we can and should talk about poetry more like
the way we talk about baseball than the way we talk about God.
It
might
then
be
seen as the duty of interpretation
to
avoid hierophantic complica–
tions and to render itself unnecessary as it extends our experience of the
poem.
*
*
*
It's possible that a break with what was considered literary Modernism
occurred in the fifties without anyone being quite aware of it, even the
writers themselves (in painting, the disruption was more explicit) . Maybe
the significant split on hermeticism was between Eliot and Pound on one
side and Williams and Stevens (literally) on the other, though the split is
more or less embodied in all these figures. The break is implicit in the
distinction Olson made between Pound and Williams in the
Mayan Letters
of 1953, but this is apparently not what Olson thought he was saying:
The primary contrast, for our purposes is , BILL: his Pat is the exact
opposite of Ez's, that is , Bill HAS an emotional system which is capable
of extensions
&
comprehensions the ego-system (the Old Deal, Ez as
Cento Man here dates) is not.
In 1965 Creeley,
to
whom the
Letters
were written, glossed this to mean
that, for Pound , "the
ego
or mind is made the sole measure of such ex–
perience" while "Williams offers an
emotional
system, which does not limit
the context of writing
to
an assumption of
understanding .
"
It
seems
to
me
that the real difference in question is simply that between an imposed order
and one that develops as it
goes
along-"occurs as it occurs," as Stevens
would say, "by digression" as Laurence Sterne would put it, or, in terms of
jazz, by improvisation . If it is true that such a way of proceeding is capable
of comprehensions beyond those of the "ego-system," it may
be
to say that
