[I’ve already apologized
to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further:
AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading
up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further
Appalachian analyses.]
On how context can
amplify and enrich our analysis of individual authors and works.
I had a high
school English teacher who really liked Robert Creeley, so we read a
fair amount of his work as part of a poetry unit; I then read a good bit more
Creeley as part of a college poetry course with the great Helen Vendler; and I
returned to Creeley one more time as a supplemental author for a grad school
paper I was writing on Robert
Penn Warren’s poetry. I was of course a very different person and reader at
each of those stages, but one thing remained the same: Creeley’s poetry did
very little for me. I appreciated his potent, imagistic
use of language, which reminded me a bit of William
Carlos Williams; but for whatever reason, the depths that I have consistently
found and appreciated in Williams’ poems eluded me when I read Creeley’s at
each of those different moments.
My perspective
on Creeley and his poetry has significantly evolved, however, and it has done
so in large part through a better understanding of his principal literary and
cultural communities: the Black
Mountain Poets, and Asheville, NC’s Black Mountain College where
they were located. It generally helps to have a sense of what goals and
concepts infuse a poet’s work, for example, and reading Charles Olson’s seminal
essay “Projective Verse” (1950), widely considered a manifesto for the Black
Mountain Poets, gave me a much clearer sense of the use to which Creeley and
his colleagues hoped to put their striking images. Olson writes of “Objectism, …
a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which
a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be
as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as
wood can be when a man has had his hand to it.” A distinctly Appalachian
analogy to be sure, and one borne out by the careful shaping of Creeley and his
peers.
Yet Black Mountain College
was more than just home to this group of avant-garde poets; over its 23
years of existence (1933-1956), the experimental educational institution featured
instruction from (among many others!) Willem and Elaine de
Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage,
Merce Cunningham, Robert
Duncan, and Olson and Creeley, as well as guest lectures by William Carlos
Williams and a certain physicist by the name of Albert Einstein. The College’s
influence on modernist and postmodernist American culture, as well as on
society more broadly, was profound and lasting, and the Black Mountain Poets
represent only one part of those widespread effects. But they were a part of
it, and it a part of them--and the more we can see Creeley and his fellow poets
as operating within that experimental, artistic but also social and educational,
southern Appalachian space, the more we (no, I’ll speak for myself, the more I)
can appreciate their works.
Last Appalachian
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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