Postmodernist Poems
Table of Contents:
Frank O’ Hara, “On Personism” (essay)
“On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,”
John Ashbery, “Melodic trains”
“Ode to Bill”
Jane Miller, Two poems
Barbara Guest, “Two Poems”
Lynn Hejinian, poems
Marjorie Welish, poems
Michael Burkard, poems
Forest Gander, Poems
James tate, poems
Joe Wenderoth, poems
Dean Young, “One Story”
Add Michael Palmer
Bridget
Frank O’Hara PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO
Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”
That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, “Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!” you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Two many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is “yearning.”
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between “the nostalgia of the infinite” and “the nostalgia for the infinite” defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personisms, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life—giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Debuffet’s to painting.
What can we expect of Personism? (This is getting good, isn’t it?) Everything but we won’t get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.
September 3, 1959
Frank O' Hara, from SELECTED POEMS
"On Rachmaninoff's Birthday"
Quick! a last poem before I go
off my rocker. Oh Rachmaninoff!
Onset, Massachusetts. Is it the fig-newton
playing the horn? Thundering windows
of hell, will your tubes ever break
into powder? Oh my palace of oranges,
junk shop, staples, umber, basalt,
I'm a child again when I was really
miserable, a grope pizzicato. My pocket
of rhinestone, yoyo, carpenter's pencil,
amethyst, hypo, campaign button,
is the room full of smoke? Shit
on the soup, let it burn. So it's back.
You'll never be mentally sober.
John Ashbery, “ODE TO BILL”
Some things we do take up a lot more time
And are considered a fruitful, natural thing to do.
I am coming out of one way to behave
Into a plowed cornfield. On my left, gulls,
On an inland vacation. They seem to mind the way I write.
Or, to take another example: last month
I vowed to write more. What is writing?
Well, in my case, it's getting down on paper
Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe:
Ideas about thoughts. Thoughts is too grand a word.
Ideas is better, though not exactly what I mean.
Someday I'll explain. Not today though.
I feel as though someone had made me a vest
Which I was wearing out of doors into the countryside
Out of loyalty to the person although
There is no one to see, except me
With my inner vision of what I look like.
The wearing is both a duty and a pleasure
Because it absorbs me, absorbs me too much.
One horse stands out irregularly against
The land over there. And am I receiving
This vision? Is it mine, or do I already owe it
For other visions, unnoticed and unrecorded
On the great, relaxed curve of time.
All the forgotten springs, dropped pebbles,
Songs once heard that the passed out of light
Into everyday oblivion? He moves away slowly,
Looks up and pumps the sky, a lingering
Question. Him too we can sacrifice
To the end, progress, for we must, we must be moving on.
“MELODIC TRAINS”
A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernails
Asks me what time it is—evidently that's a toy wristwatch
She's wearing, for fun. And it is fun to wear other
Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat
Like date-colored sierras with the lines of seams
Sketched in and plunging now and then into unfathomable
Valleys that can't be deduced by the shape of the person
Sitting inside it—me, and just as our way is flat across
Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil
Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
We both come to see distance as something unofficial
And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
Like the time of a stopped watch—right twice a day.
Only the wait in stations is vague and
Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
Time to spend in each? One beings to suspect there's no
Rule or that it's applied haphazardly.
Sadness of the faces of children on the platform,
Concern of the grownups for connections, for the chances
Of getting a taxi, since these have no timetable.
You get one if you can find one though in principle
You can always find one, but the segment of chance
In the circle of certainty is what gives these leaning
Tower of Pisa figures their aspect of dogged
Impatience, banking forward into the wind.
In short any stop before the final one creates
Clouds of anxiety, of sad, regretful impatience
With ourselves, our lives, the way we have been dealing
With other people up until now. Why couldn't
We have been more considerate? These figures leaving
The platform or waiting to board the train are my brothers
In a way that really wants to tell me whey there is so little
Panic and disorder in the world, and so much unhappiness.
If I were to get down now to stretch, take a few steps
In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great
White apples, might I just through proximity and aping
Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine
To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,
That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within
My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last
Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means
Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions of home?
It's as though a visible chorus called up the different
Stages of the journey, singing about them and being them:
Not the people in the station, not the child opposite me
With currant fingernails, but the windows, seen through,
Reflecting imperfectly, ruthlessly splitting open the bluish
Vague landscape like a zipper. Each voice has its own
Descending scale to put one in one's place at every stage;
One need never not know hwere one is
Unless one give up listening, sleeping, approaching a small
Western town that is nothing but a windmill. Then
The great fury of the end can drop as the solo
Voices tell about it, wreathing it somehow with an aura
Of good fortune and colossal welcomes from the mayor and
Citizens' committees tossing their hats into the air.
To hear them singing you'd think it had already happened
And we had focused back on the furniture of the air.
JANE MILLER, “Sycamore Mall” from AMERICAN ODALISQUE
Coppola's Cotton Club starts at Campus Two Cinema Saturday 6:45 mall time.
The Negroes in the film are played by blacks,
playing opposite the tennis shop, tobacconist, lingerie & antennae sales,
a glass-cased elevator & automatic bank teller.
Because this is a strangeness tendered in others,
a display of the humiliated
& recast human being, a thing Michelangelo transcended by marble
in David with its over-sized right hand,
because this is a tenderness strange in others,
I dine formally in a towel with day-lilies & hydrangeas on the table,
fresh raspberries & roses in their second bloom,
then sympathetically go out on the town.
Symptomatically it is as if I am approaching the Doge's Palace in Venice
& the piazza is covered with ice.
I exit my hotel on the Grand Canal, Paganelli's,
& slide arm in arm with my lover.
It was right to act back then, in summer, as if I were living
a love story that would be simple, with its curious
nocturnal glow, not unlike the mall hybrid light,
where like a single thought there persisted
an electronic chant on the Basilica the choir repeats a benediction.
No one ever touches himself in public
because we've all rubbed off on one another, Our Lord, so much we're invisible.
That is what has become of the tree for which Our Mall received its name,
with hope that it won't be the end of the world of we act out
of our best mood, surprisingly delighted original sex
without climax, a gift reserved for the end of the century
for those who still live by the spirit
of an act, on a street prepped like a movie set.
It was right to act back then, & to trust the movement
of the affair to the relationship
& insist on perfection. It'll be a while
before we are hoisted & joined as characters on a screen in sepia tone
for a theater inside a mall under the influence of temperature control.
Painfully one day we wake & haven't the right
clothes for Venice. It has snowed as it did, we are told, once a lifetime
ago; the full evening moon floods the piazza & in the morning
workers haul benches for the tourists to pass over.
A simple pear from a painting, or the marble hair of the David,
bandages art places over our eyes,
survive in Renaissance books next to the jog & diet shelf.
Michelangelo & Giotto appear naked to the touch,
holier because no one is fully conscious not ever able
to forget anything under the false light of the dome,