Bill Sylvester

On Henry Rago And Poetry, the ‘Adamant Loneliness’ of the 1940s, Then Buffalo.

An Online Interview/Essay

William A. Sylvester has published poems in magazines like Chelsea, Commonweal, Poetry, Exquisite Corpse, and House Organ for over 50 years now. He is the founding editor of Buffalo Vortex and has produced work by Sheila Murphy, Mike Basinski, and Ken Warren, among others. His own recent titles include Her Insulting Suicide / William Sylvester and Aristotle (Oasis ndl), Think big, die (Channel 500 ndl) and War and Lechery: the Poem (Ashland Poetry Press 1995). I first met Bill at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1980s where he was a Professor in the English Department. I approached him for this interview in the fall of 2003. For lack of a better way, we chose to do it over the Internet. But in January 2004, the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, Maine announced a conference on Poets of the 1940s, and both Bill and I gave papers there, so we continued this interview face to face. By luck, Michael Basinski, the curator for the Small Press Collection at SUNY Buffalo also gave a paper there, and he joined in. The following, then, was compiled from paragraph-length e-mail responses framed by that face to face interview in Orono on June 24, 2004. I have taken the liberty of arranging the material in a readable format. Bruce Holsapple

Holsapple: Hi Bill. Can you give us first a sense of your background, where you were raised, what your parents and family were like, where you went to school? For instance, when and where were you born? Who were your parents?

Sylvester: I was born July 1, 1918 in Washington D.C. [My father:] Laurence Arthur Sylvester. He died in 1968. [My mother:] Consuelo Emilie Ruoff. She died in 1925.

We lived in a huge house, probably from the 1850’s, that had belonged to my great-grandmother. I have memories of it as a spooky place, with huge ceilings, a second floor extension porch, a long parlor that was dark, in fact the whole house was dark, all three stories of it, and we lived in a smaller attachment. The house was much too big to heat, so it was closed off. The greenhouses outside were in decay from my earliest memories. The outhouses were still standing, although “new plumbing” had been put in. I remember the toilet in the bathroom—the bathroom itself about the size of a hut [my wife] Jean and I lived in 1948—it had a big water tank, and a chain, that when pulled could start quite a waterfall.

The house had quite a few trees, and every older person I knew spoke of the grounds and the house with great pleasure. My sister, two years younger, looked forward to moving to the “new house” on the corner of what had been once part of the original property. In between the old house and the new house, the stables had been sold off to a wealthy neighbor who took a horse ride every morning at six o’clock. So the new house, from another point of view, was an acknowledgment of a severe retreat in family standards. It was a house built without space specifically for servants.

My early life felt financially constricted, although I never missed a meal or lacked for anything essential. My father never made more than $3000 a year, and usually on the weekend when he came home, the housekeeper, Ellen, had some doleful report of late bills, of how often the farmer, Mr. Moyer, had said that the bills for chickens, eggs, butter had gone unpaid.

My sister and I lived isolated lives; the few neighbors we had were scattered through what was a quasi-country side. My grandmother paid for my education at a private boy’s day school, William Penn Charter. It took close to an hour to walk through the fields, to get to a trolley, and then cross through Germantown and out the other side to school. When I got there I had a few friends, most of them lived in houses a little better than ours, but not enough to make a big difference. And there were big big differences. Many of the students were driven to school by chauffeurs, and came from powerful families. Heinz of Heinz pickles, Hires of Hires root beer, Burpee of Burpee seeds. Some of the not so rich became powerful. One, Michael von Moschisker, helped restore the central historical part of Philadelphia.

We all had a loosely held assumption about society and art that was in fact quite wide spread at the time. The best way to characterize it is from Henry James’s Lady Barberina who thought that some people—journalists, novelists, painters, sculptors—were to represent, and others, like herself, were to be represented. That was my assumption too. I knew that I wanted to write, and the way to write was to represent others—interviews with musicians, program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth concerts, and later, I expected to write for newspapers as a music critic and of course to write a novel, a more imaginative mode, one that expressed a view of society. With this view, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos were doing in a profound complex way what journalists were also doing in a hasty first draft fashion.

These assumptions seemed to fit into a society where “making things” was still the way to wealth, or so it seemed. Root beer, pickles, seeds, or in my family background, pharmacy, doctoring, printing. The “thingness” was stressed at the cost of underestimating the abstract talent that was to emerge in the fifties, the managerial talent, the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (written as you may remember by a PR man for the private University of Buffalo). Society as “what is done to and by things” began to be in a turmoil, a hidden turmoil in a search for abstractions, a need for some abstract definition of the world around us, particularly after the strange uneasiness of our victory [in WW II], that might lead to a worse war with Russia.

Would we do it through Freud? Through “Peace of Mind”? Through a newly educated society, larger universities and larger corporations? (Much later, deconstruction would serve the contrary purpose, and go hand in hand with “downsizing.”) Where was the novel that would coordinate our feelings about these uncertainties? For a while it seemed to be All the King’s Men, but for organizing our feelings, poetry, it seemed to me, was taking the high ground of “relevance” away from the novel, as were the social sciences. Yes, Auden might say in his “Academic Decalogue”: “Thou shalt not commit a social science” but the truth remains that few novels could compete with the deep feelings aroused by The Lonely Crowd.

Holsapple: When did you start writing poetry or know you wanted to write?

Sylvester: I began with a keen interest in prose, and poetry was a minor sideline really until the late fifties—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and many students, their own poetry, and their interests, e.g., Gary Snyder. The huge reassessment of everything was in 1965 at Buffalo mainly through Creeley.

Holsapple: Did you serve in the military?

Sylvester: I was in the Naval Air Corps 1941-45, as a navigator. We essentially served as a supply transport. The deaths were mainly from our incompetence and not the enemy.

Holsapple: What was your early reading like or, more narrowly, what reading got under your skin?

Sylvester: I had time to myself in the Navy, during training and transatlantic flights, so the novel was important, particularly, Thomas Wolfe. It’s hard to bring back the extraordinary love some of us felt for Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel (a title from Milton). I remember feeling “this is new, this is getting to the thingness of things,” as in the preface, “….a stone, a leaf, an unfound door” as if every word pointed to some particular thing, as if I knew exactly what those words meant and the feeling were well defined. But what did that stone, leaf, door add up to? He wasn’t trying to add up. He was getting away from all that, whatever “that” means in a basically adolescent rebellion. Then the ending of the paragraph “lost, among bright mazes lost, on this most unbright cinder, lost by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.” (Probably unfairly inaccurate.) Some later writer was to say to the effect that the word “lost” would be forever lost to any writer.

But I was more deeply affected by e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, and later Wallace Stevens. With Stevens, I began to move from what had been written before to what was in the process of being written in 1945 and after. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls opened up Donne ’s poetry, and during this period, I read Eliot’s Four Quartets for the first time. I found particular delight in e. e. cummings: “and the duckbilled platitude lays & lays / And Lays aytash unee.” (But also the anti war feeling of “my sweet old etcetera aunt lucy.”) All quotes are from memory, and so not reliable, but they illustrate a couple of trends, I think. First, that the Navy I knew was special, all male, all college grads, or close to grad, with time enough to do a considerable amount of reading in between moments of great danger. The dangers were (I may have said) owing to our incompetence. So there were losses of people our own age, and in literature we turned to works that spoke to our immediate fears, and, one should not forget, our uneasy residue of pacifism.

Milton, Donne, Hemingway, cummings, and—Shakespeare, the Henry the IV plays, and Falstaff. These were the authors we turned to freely, and were part of the trade publication of the day. So if I get to the question of “changes in literary taste” one way of answering is to raise another question: How did we begin to experience accepted literature that was different and marked a change?

The sense of “thingness” from Thomas Wolfe is hardly a sophisticated response at all, but was that sense peculiarly mine? Most people I knew thought of Thomas Wolfe as “getting the whole thing right, just right,” because we were all looking homeward, we were all angels, and all lost, at least fictionally lost. So my own word “thingness” was more wishful response than an accurate critical analysis. At that time I was finding a virtue that later Heidegger would consider a limitation, if not a downright vice. I believed that Wolfe’s sentences corresponded to an outer physical reality. Heidegger said that philosophy has suffered, because the Romans translated complex Greek concepts into more simple mind Latin, so that “subject” as a outer matter corresponded to the grammatical “subject” and so Dingbau, the structure of things, was mirrored by Satzbau, sentence structure, with the consequence that western minds were narrowed to materialism. And yet I did love Wolfe’s grandiloquently rolling vagueness, and I still get great pleasure from a page or two.

How many others were concerned with a “thingness” and also — inconsistently — the grandiloquently rolling vagueness? Was my finding e. e. cummings delightfully iconoclastic peculiar to me? In graduate school, I was struck by a characterization of my generation, the grad students of 1947 and by a Shakespeare scholar — I forget his name—who meant it as a put down. I read it with a sense of triumph at the time; poor old codger, he didn’t realize that a new world was arising. He had said that we read Shakespeare in a strange way, reducing his plays to strange patterns of “speed curves” and “organic growth.” Reduce? We were discovering his true vitality. But were we reading Shakespeare? Or looking forward to Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”?

Holsapple: You went to Chicago to graduate school and there met Henry Rago? What’s the chronology here?

Sylvester: I met Henry Rago before going into graduate school. That would place meeting him in late 1945, early 1946. I had written a novel, and Bonnie Larkin had suggested that I send it Henry Rago. At that time he was a reader for a new publishing house, Pelegrini and Cudahy (money from the Cudahy meat packers, I suppose). Henry was interested and wanted to have it published, but they decided against it. I had wanted to write fiction, and I thought I’d go ahead with fiction after I got a job in teaching. I never expected to do scholarly work, and in fact I never have. I wrote one piece of theory on disjunction, and that got published mainly because I had sketched out the basic notions at a meeting, impromptu, and I guess put on quite a show, to judge from the response, but in cold print it wasn’t that successful—sort of like performance poetry. I do like reading scholarship, particularly the old fashioned antiquarianism, and some theory has generated a lot of inner heat for me, but I rarely follow a theory in any consistent way. I guess I want the expression of theory to be a poem—as in Heraclitus, Parmenides. Also I select those parts of Aristotle that prove my sense of him as the poet of perception. But consider this from Zukofsky (A-12), a close translation of Aristotle:

Beyond Physics
All men by nature desire
(It is put—but, in effect, love) to know
We delight in our senses
Aside from their usefulness
They are loved for themselves—
And most of all the sense of sight
Brings to light differences
between things.

Desire, senses, know, sight, delight . . . . Aristotle is the poet of perception (aisthesis), perception as aesthetics. “Say it, no ideas but in things!”

Michael Basinski: How is it you found your way into that Poetry network in Chicago in the 1940s and, if that was a community of writers, what were the other magazines? More generally, how did you find other magazines? How did editors find poets?

Sylvester: How I got there I’m not totally sure because I just suddenly—my first memory is being there with Geraldine Udell and doing some proof-reading with her and then later a clear memory of stuffing envelopes with Gerry and one of her roommates. She had two roommates—shared an apartment with two women. One turned out to be Jean [Grover] whom I—fortunately!— later married. The other was Gwen Goodrich who married a professor at the University of Michigan. I suspect what happened was I simply walked in to Poetry magazine and started talking. One of the hard things to get—which makes me feel the “adamant loneliness” that Robert Creeley mentions as typical of right after World War II—was very likely because we were incessant chatterers speaking out of a kind of desperation, as I look back on it. For example—and remember all of this is with a great deal of chastity involved, particularly chastity of speech I mean—Gerry Udell had a man who saw her regularly. She had an apartment and he saw her with a great deal of fidelity and nobody questioned what the relationship was—we just didn’t mention these things. And the fact that I just walked in there [to Poetry] out of some kind of desperation—of course Geraldine, who had been there since the days of Harriet Monroe, loved to talk so she just started talking. That’s how I think it got started and I’m pretty sure I offered to–Is there something you’d like me to do?—because I was trying to write novels in those days, write stories, so. One of the big publications when I was in the service was Story Magazine and that was like the New Yorker for a lot of people.

Basinski: You know Story Magazine because it was in the newsstands and in libraries and your teachers would have said this magazine was a measure of . . . ?

Sylvester: No, this was when I was in the service and I heard about it from other people who were interested in stories. See, I was kept away from the usual English Departments because my major was French and my minor was German and so I had very few English courses and I really don’t have a sense of what went on in them.

Holsapple: Any other magazines than Story?

Sylvester: Personally I didn’t read anything at that time except Time and the newspaper and books. The new magazines that came to my attention were Golden Goose and the Cummington Press and things like that. But by and large we didn’t pay much attention even to Poetry itself. The Poetry groupies weren’t that closely involved with Poetry. It was the repository of greatness, right, and it was going to be great because great writers were still going to write for it, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. But we really didn’t like, well, for instance, Theodore Roethke is—I still think he’s dull. This was before Accent, Sewanee Review, Partisan Review.

Basinski: How did Golden Goose get to you?

Sylvester: From Henry Rago. He brought these things in. Think of what Rago—the things I’ve forgotten—Briggflats! Zukofsky and Creeley! That plus others, you know . . . . I recently learned from Jay Parini’s anthology that a lot of the Beats would not submit to Poetry. They just refused. Ginsberg had agreed to send a poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” I think, but it turned out he’d already let a high school publication have it, and Rago, I’m sorry to say, stuck to the magazine’s policy. It had to be first publication in Poetry. So Ginsberg didn’t appear at all. This is mildly surprising because Karl Shapiro’s poetry could easily seem hospitable to the Beats. One aspect that they had in common: the use of flat out statements, that do not admit of any approximation, just disagreement.

I experienced the 40’s in poetry mainly through Henry Rago. It was the period of great modern masters—Pound, Eliot, and for Henry, above all, Stevens and Stein. From his “table talk” I would draw some rough generalization, tendencies of his. Rago had tremendous range. In the first place [his sense of] creativity included pop art—his love of Hollywood movies. He took us to Sidney Bechet which was an absolute astonishment to me. I liked jazz but I’d never heard of Sidney Bechet and never seen a soprano sax and Sidney Bechet struck me as special, a different kind of jazz musician, and I said to Henry afterwards, What is there about that music which is so involving? He said, The sexuality.

Poetry could not be neatly categorized: he loved to quote Gertrude Stein to the effect that a dramatic poem is a lyric that is a little more lyrical than a drama. “Geez, doc, what the hell does it mean” [from Williams] was a question never to be asked. The meaning is always there. He had a physical response to poetry, radiant with intense pleasure, or ashen gray with disapproval. (I remember his response to Karl Shapiro, an early reading. Henry leaned forward, whispering not to me, but to himself, C’est du journalisme.) These tendencies pretty quickly lead to parataxais or to a new sense of continuity. Add to this a sense of the importance of vocal delivery, how does it sound, and we have a slant toward the forties and to what has become “establishment” poetry that is not far different from the so-called Black Mountain poems when he was editor 1955-1968.

Basinski: What years were you in Chicago?

Sylvester: 1945 to 1947. Jean and I were married in 1947.

Holsapple: How did you meet Jean?

Sylvester: We met on a blind date set up by Bonnie Larkin, and the first meeting nearly ended the relationship immediately. I had unexpectedly met somebody I had gone to school with—although I didn’t know him very well, so his date, and my date, Jean, had to sit there and listen to us talk.

Basinski: So when I see your poem in Matrix in 1946, edited by Joseph Moskovitch, that was when you were sitting in the company of Henry Rago, and [Matrix] would have been a magazine that probably came to Poetry? It’s almost mimeograph, made of construction paper . . .

Sylvester: Oh yes! And Charles Bukowski published there?

Basinski: And a lot of other people, William Carlos Williams, Anias Nin, James Laughlin.

Sylvester: And the pitiful truth is none of that really touched me. As questioning the highly imitative stuff I did . . .

Holsapple: Which was modeled on what?

Sylvester: John Frederick Nims. Iambic, well-organized stuff. Getting back to the Poetry Groupies. I was once going to write you a long hard copy letter about my own view of poetry over quite a few decades, including a passage explaining, from my point of view, why the “New Criticism” had such a powerful hold at one time, how it was intimately connected with deconstruction, and on and on. I guess I will try to do a series of emails instead.

I’ll start with a few casual memories of Henry Rago. First snapshot, Henry and his friend Jim Eichelberger, a copy writer for advertising, doing little impromptu shticks, poking fun of the military, doing them mock seriously and then breaking into fou rires. Henry was three years older than I, had published in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse when he was 14. All of his friends called him Hank, but we—the groupies around Poetry—called him Henry. That was owing to Bonnie Larkin. I’ll start with Bonnie Larkin, and the late forties, that period of “adamant loneliness” because it is a background to Henry Rago, who into the sixties was a strong force in poetry, by being receptive to new talent. But the period immediately after the war has some characteristics.

So here is Bonnie Larkin who came from Kansas and who was going to marry John Frederick Nims and you look at Jean Grover who came form Gloversville, New York and I was from Philadelphia, we were all displaced a little, particularly displaced in jobs. Bonnie was a copy writer for an advertising agency. Henry Rago’s friends were a lot of them in advertising or radio. People didn’t think of English Departments as a place for a poet. Henry Rago taught some interdisciplinary programs in philosophy and something else. He had a Law Degree and a degree in philosophy—it may have been theology—and he saw philosophy as a reasonable thing to do, a good idea if you wanted to be a teacher—but not English Departments. You don’t go to an English Department. I want to get back to the “adamant loneliness” of the 1940s.

Bonnie Larkin and the Problem of Jobs

Bonnie Larkin, vivacious, witty, was, significantly enough, in advertising, writing copy. She was part of the Poetry groupies, which included [my future wife] Jean, and as I have mentioned, Geraldine Udell, who worked for Harriet Monroe. The connection between advertising and poetry was part of the times. Nobody thought of poetry as a way of earning a living, or for that matter, nobody thought of teaching as a way of supporting yourself while writing. You were a doctor, a vice president of an insurance company, worked at a bank, or—like Robie McCauley, the now forgotten novelist—you worked for a magazine—in his case, Playboy.

So Bonnie Larkin, interested in poetry and literature, certainly saw nothing strange about doing ad copy and hanging out at Poetry. She would call me up in the morning and ask if I could have lunch with her. (She never had lunch alone, by the way.) She had a problem she wanted to talk about, a literary problem. She had to do some copy about a new dress, something fall-like and brown, like apple-cider brown, but she didn’t like that, so would I have lunch with her? Of course, knowing in advance that she would NEVER talk about her copy work. She wanted to talk about her friend John, with whom she was having a very difficult courtship. For I soon learned I didn’t have to worry about thinking about apple-cider brown. She was there to talk about herself, her ambivalence, and she knew it.

Gerry Udell disapproved of this terribly, because it’s not right, she said, because instead of Bonny doing work, she starts calling people for lunch. The people she’d call were frequently people from Poetry or some of the wealthy patrons. And then she’d talk about her boyfriend, and the problems she was having with him, because he was extremely jealous. For example, Bonnie was entertaining some friends, female, called a “hen party” in those days. John came to the apartment, walked through the assembled young women, went straight to the bathroom, took a shower, dried himself off, got dressed, and walked back through the silent young women, and out the door without saying a word. Nims for a while was an editor of Poetry (in fact he did two stints).

I was the same [as her]. I called Bonnie one time and said—I was staying with my father and stepmother—in a very comfortable place—I said to her, There’s a lock broken. Do you know of a locksmith in Chicago? She began to giggle, deep throaty giggle, “Come on over and we’ll talk about it,” and she kept on giggling. I think she didn’t stop until I got there early on a Saturday afternoon. When I got there she said we could look up the name of a locksmith in the yellow pages, which of course we did. I didn’t see anything funny. Well yes I did, but what was the difference between her saying that she wanted to talk about “apple-cider brown,” or whatever it was, and my “locksmith.” What we really wanted to talk about basically was, not her problems about John or my edging over toward Jean, essentially we wanted to talk about jobs—the ridiculous world we lived in with advertising people, writing for trade journals, poetry, and novels, all mixed together. And I talked for six hours! What in God’s Name am I going to do, what kind of job? I was beginning to realize that I didn’t have any stories to tell. I had a huge mass of stuff, New Yorkerish stories, very wry, detached kinds of things. I threw them all away. Probably good riddance. But I began to realize this was an end for me.

She never talked about what I was writing. But how do you go about getting it published? And so she suggested I send to Henry Rago. We also talked a great deal about the strange background of high society and wealthy Protestants who surrounded Poetry, quite a contrast to Henry’s Italian family, clannish, I suppose. In short, we both seemed to be in agreement that our present lives, the lives of the city, were interesting, creative, and strangely unsatisfactory. It was a Chicago of Nelson Algren, and of “off-beat” lives that were—like Marianne Moore—ultimately very, very proper. Once Henry took me to see a friend of his who was a free lance writer and had published a book, a novel about his high school days. I’m not sure of the title; Fuck You Miss Slagle sticks in my mind but that may be a title I’ve picked up from somewhere else. And his wife was a librarian. He stayed at home while his wife worked. He was a charming, a nice fellow, but I thought, Oh good God, is this success?! They were staying in this little apartment, the wife working, and he gets that published—I mean, this was sort of the “truth” of the free lance writer. But what Bonnie and I tended to talk about seemed to come into focus with several of Henry’s observations. Two of the sharpest: “Writers today seem to be struggling either to get into the Catholic Church, or to get out of it” and “Psychoanalysis is spreading ever where. It is a white plague.”

The Church and the Couch

Henry Rago admired Kenneth Burke enormously, and imitated Burke’s vivacity. Henry sliced the air with his palms held parallel “Plato is over here,” and then moved his hands and repeated the gesture “and Aristotle is over there.” When Burke came to UB [SUNY at Buffalo] for a lecture, Jean and I had invited him over to our house for a reception, so I asked him if he wanted anything before we took off. He said he was thirsty, and as he was very old, I did my best to get some water for him, but after hours, nothing was open, and by the time we got to our house, I was afraid he was dehydrated, so I immediately got him a glass of water. “Water!” he laughed, “I meant whiskey.” Later he had kind of a triumphant laugh, because Henry had wanted to be Burke’s literary executor, but Henry had died long before. Henry admired Burke’s “immediacy”: I remember in particular a piece Burke did on Mark Anthony’s funeral speech in Julius Caesar, and by careful weaving of quotes and insights, “proved”—I thought then and still do—that the audience and the Romans on the stage become one.

This sense of immediacy was at the center of Henry’s faith and experience of art. Let me repeat his response to: “How can you, Henry Rago, a Catholic, justify printing poems by Communists?” And he said in effect (at a lecture) that no effective poem can be circumscribed by an ideology, but any ideology can serve to heighten the tensions between will and necessity. This nexus is relevant to his religion, to Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Sidney Bechet—areas of keen interest.

Rago quoted Wallace Stevens at great length, and it had a sense of great immediacy. The Rage for Order, the death of Satan as a tragedy for the imagination. Parts of A World had come out, and Stevens was in full career. But how did these tendencies show up in particular poems in the 1940’s? First of all, one of the “poems of the 40’s” was Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” of 1915. It had a feeling of “nowness” in 1940 partly because it responded indirectly to Rago’s sense that writers were either struggling to get into the Church (meaning Catholic) or struggling to get out, or in a more general way to the “turmoil of the times.” Stevens was an immediate contemporary, still writing, and part of our environment. 1915 was now, just as today, Lorine Neidecker feels like a contemporary to many poets, such as Elizabeth Willis.

One defining characteristic of the 1940’s was the faith that a poet and the reader shared a common imagination, so that the impact of the poem did not need interpretation and did not need criticism. The problem I am having is with the word “immediacy”—it slips into solipsism. By “immediacy” I mean without mediation—without comforting moralities, abstractions, or explanations—the immediate reading of a Stevens poem can be very complex, and is worth reflection. The poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully, but the connection between the naive first reading and subsequent reading should be a constant flow.

Turning to the Couch

I remember the late 1940’s mantra among some graduate students, accounting, political science, for example, oversimplifying A. J. Ayers, “If it doesn’t end in a sensory experience, it is non-sense.” Or, mainly from Karl Popper, “Plato was frankly, openly totalitarian, if you just read him.” And there was a strong anti-Catholic feeling, stimulated by Paul Blanshard, who saw mendacious rich Catholics everywhere (American Freedom and Catholic Power, Beacon Press 1949). B.F.Skinner’s “Behavioralism” was doing a good business, and became prosperously resented. Underneath all of these contradictory and powerful feelings was a sense of “things are not right,” including the Universities. Were we fighting authoritarianism or promoting it? The questions were too difficult. So we turned to the couch, the “white plague” as Henry Rago called it, “analysis,” and for a while it was considered very dangerous.

Around 1949, at a dinner party, as part of the general chitchat I asked a therapist (of some sort or another)—I felt impelled to say something—so I asked what I sensed was a kind of dumb, time-filling question: How can you tell whether problems come from childhood or from society? Instead of banalities, he jumped to life, “You don’t really, and that’s a problem, a BIG problem.” I remember his stressing the word “big.” He gave me a range of reasons, more than I can remember, but I was struck by one observation. In his experience, his White patients often had difficulty in recognizing feelings of sexuality, but they had no problems in being in touch with anger. For his Black patients it was the other way about. They had great difficulty in recognizing anger—surely in part because it was often so dangerous for them to express, but they could talk about sexual feelings quite easily. He said quite openly that one could not be sure of therapy at all, but it was the best we had. This is as close as I ever got to hearing from a practitioner that therapy may have been truly misleading. For whatever reason, the dominant theory of the late forties, the New Criticism, or at least the would-be New Critics, saw The Couch as vulgarly self-indulgent.

Why did we feel that we were at the center of the 40’s? Now that I look back upon it, I suspect that we responded in ways that we might not admit to, if put in these terms: It’s as if we had taken two notions from Mozart and had found or had been blessed with the secret of blending them into one: in one of his letters Mozart said that music is divided between the doers, those involved, the Beflissene, and those who listen who enjoyed, loved and savored music, the Liebhaber. I think we felt as if we were both at once, whether we were listening to Sydney Bechet, Lil Armstrong, or quoting Wallace Stevens, or Gertrude Stein. And we were untraditional, not caring whether the words were used in conventional ways or twisted as in cummings. Rago loved to quote Pound, the nugget of gold that gathers the light around it. We shared the immediacy of listening, as if it were one with whatever writing we did. We excluded the question of “what does it mean” as essentially silly, whether put to Bechet’s music, or Stevens poetry. What is its energy? that we could understand. The sense of energy was more important than any classification. We recognized “the complacencies of the peignoir,” and welcomed a cockatoo without labeling them as “ornamental”—a careful apothecary of astringents, gums, balms, so that no hauteurs are violated, transmitted an immediate and subtly controlled energy with the reassurances of familiar abstractions.

So the poetry of the forties consisted mainly of us, and the others. Of course the definition of the “us” tended to vary with the speaker, but there was at least one set of “us” who considered the greatness of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse to consist in its publishing poets, like Stevens, like Gertrude Stein, poems that we enjoyed directly. We also believed that most of the poems in Poetry, alas, were by the others, the bland leading the bland, as someone has said, poems that made remarks about problems, or classified feelings.

As I remember our interests in the classroom, and in readings, we believed — maybe I should say, I believed, assuming that my ego includes Rago’s influence—I believed that we were presenting an unmediated impact of the poem itself, of the play itself, how it affected the reader or the listener directly. Music began Twelfth Night and ended it. There had to be music playing before the words in the first line, “play on,” and a song ended the play. There was a musical byplay between the names Viola/Olivia, an intertwining of genders. But Hamlet begins with noise. There must be noise before the opening words; “Who’s there?” And the last words of the play are difficult to pronounce clearly: “bid the soldiers shoot” We were delighted to show how the forty odd scenes of Antony and Cleopatra were—given the Elizabethan stage—truly a continuum.

I wasn’t ashamed of what seemed like pedantries. For an example, take the passage from Midsummer Night’s Dream, about “The lover, the madman and the poet.” J. Dover Wilson discovered that the same passage appeared in an early edition, with exactly the same words, but with some misprints. In three places, there were fewer lines, but the lines were longer. Why would they set the type correctly, and then for a few lines make a mistake, go back to correct type setting, and make another mistake? Wilson suggested that the printers were working from Shakespeare’s handwriting, and that these three passages were added by Shakespeare himself with lines (and arrows, I guess) pointing to where the additions should be inserted. If you left the passages out, the lines made perfect sense. Adding them however adds references to matters of state or of public interest. It’s as if we were watching Shakespeare at work.

And so many others. We thought we were breaking through arbitrary divisions of one kind and another. We thought we were part of a grand continuum, that there was an unmediated imagination which we all shared. Alas . . . They were nothing. Flat out. The unmediated unity between reader and writer did not include English professors in particular. More precisely, Rago wrote:

Oh pity us the metaphors in the mirror
the art obsessed by the recurrent pun
The love that writes itself as terror
And blunders through a thousand words for one.

(So much for the New Criticism . . . .) Rago’s own poetry had an unfashionable rhythm, but his distrust of the New Criticism was pretty firm—because the NC foisted patterns upon the poem, and as I have said, the reactions against the New Criticism were themselves paradoxical: structuralism, and deconstruction. I remember Derrida’s lecturing in Diefendorf annex, many years ago, in French, to about 200 people. I forget the writer he was talking about, but the purpose was very clear: that the life of the writer explained the writing, in this case the writing was about some kind of therapy. (Perhaps my forgetting shows how deeply I was threatened. Oh anyway, it occurred to me that Derrida’s own motion through space and time from Algiers to Paris was a differing, a differance that deconstructed.)

Our victories were riddled with the killings of civilians, and the GI Bill was at once “a cure and an infection.” That’s the last line of a poem by Amy Lowell, and Amy Lowell as Kenner said, was “irretrievably vulgar.” First the patterns: I think there was a deep shift in emphasis from visual to auditory patterns, from for example Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon to The Voice That Is Great Within Us, from patterns you could put on a black board, the “Introduction-Exposition-Development” of the classical symphony to Charles Rosen’s sense of the symphony as auditory variation. We now remember particular vocal deliveries Ginsberg, Creeley, Robert Bly. (Incidentally, Watten might have avoided being treated so unfairly by Baraaka at the Orono Conference [in June 2000] if he has used the phrase “vocal delivery” instead of “oral tradition.”) Listen to this by Lew Welch (from memory), where I think the words force you to hear a voice:

Never
Never put the goddam camera in the glove compartment.
I told you and told you to
never put the goddam camera in the glove compartment
so what did you do?
you put the goddam camera in the glove compartment
so it’s stolen.
See

Leonard Bernstein was rehearsing the Vienna Philharmonic for a Mahler symphony. He stopped them and said, This is a rehearsal. Why do we rehearse? You already know the notes. But where is Mahler? They went back to the passage. and the change in sound was enormous. How could such simple words cause such a profound change? Partly because it was on TV. They probably made a huge cut between those words and subsequent attempts, and yet ultimately the difference between the simplicity of what a conductor says and the complexity of the result can be enormous. But there were other pressures at work. Subtle overtones in words. This is a rehearsal. (Hier ist eine probe.) Rehearsal in German sounds like a test. (Vienna was and some say still is Nazi. Mahler was Jewish). Why do we rehearse? (Warum probieren wir?) (We, we are testing, including Leonard). Where is Mahler? (Still forbidden?) Nothing this crude was spelled out. Something that intuitive flowed. The “speed curves“ so sniffly rejected by the critic were echoes, music, or noise running throughout a play.

Holsapple: What happens when you leave Chicago?

Sylvester: I went to Minnesota. That again was very, very conservative. And the pull there was Robert Penn Warren and the novel and again we get back to the “adamant loneliness” of the time: Why in the world was All the King’s Men so powerful? And the answer is because it suggested that power is corrupt and that doing right politically was bound to involve some evil. We were having a very hard time trying to digest what we had done in WW II toward the end. All of the popular stuff about the war, the incessant stories are always about Germany, and the war with Japan is pretty much covered over. Anecdotal gossip is that that’s where we committed atrocities, that, with the Germans, there’s a terrible racial prejudice; the German prisoners were treated with a great deal of respect. People were trying to prove that we weren’t like the Germans. Our history with the Japanese is a little mixed, and the truth is, the Japanese were so hideous to us that their atrocities quantitatively probably outweighed ours. I’m not sure about that. As to the peoples’ responses, the thing that was kind of amazing in retrospect is that—it was sort of like a mantra—people mention the Holocaust. Well, we’re guilty too, presumably for not standing up earlier and preventing it.

Oppenheimer, who had worked on the bomb, had appeared on the Movietone News, or maybe Paramount News, and had looked directly at the audience and had said that when he saw the nuclear explosion, he had a sense of sin. (Not that all scientists agreed with him, far from it!) After the so-called “phony” war, the “real” war got started with the killing of civilians. The British had bombed Berlin, the Germans retaliated by bombing London, and the war continued to kill civilians—the leveling of Hamburg, firebombing of Tokyo, many times, many times. I remember people [often] repeating the notion that we too were responsible for the Holocaust—but just how was not clear. For many people the war had two impossible facts—we could not have avoided it, and it was evil. At times, art in general, poetry in particular, helped us to cope with these impossibilities.

Holsapple: Were you looking for places to publish poetry?

Sylvester: I wanted to publish anything, and I did, just about. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to be published and I remember Henry saying to me, Publishing is not as important as you think. [I said to myself] That’s ridiculous! He’s got something published! This is the sort of virginity I had to get rid of. So I went and published something in the Bibliographical Journal.

Holsapple: And part of your dilemma is that there is no way to go and be a writer, at least in an interesting way?

Sylvester: That’s right. Now the GI Bill, what it did was give us an educated class and avoided unemployment. We were scared to death of unemployment. Also remember this—before I left the Service we were talking about fighting with Russia, and very soon after ’47 Pauline Fredericks was on the air at the UN and people are scared to death of China and Russia. The GI Bill also had the effect of distorting society because, Who was eligible? Overwhelmingly white males. This created the “Greatest Generation” (Brokaw). [At this Conference] you hear Harvey Shapiro and you hear me—I outnumbered him [i.e. my kind of recruit] twelve to one: He was in real combat. I was in danger, but it wasn’t the same thing. So what you get is a society that has a people with hierarchical experience, and the hierarchy served them well, a very conservative thing. It put a distinct grade difference between men and women, so that the 50s was one of the hardest periods for the genders, because women went back into the kitchens and that was terrible.

Holsapple: And in Minnesota?

Sylvester: I was getting a Ph.D. I took a course in English in Chicago, then went to Minnesota partly because I did very well on one exam with a visiting professor from Minnesota who then invited me up there. And I hadn’t heard about the New Criticism.

Holsapple: Is this were you were introduced to Robert Penn Warren’s critical work?

Sylvester: No, I’ve learned about that on this trip [to Orono]. I had heard about these things but sort of avoided them.

Holsapple: But you met Penn Warren in Minnesota?

Sylvester: Oh yeah, I studied with him.

Robert Penn Warren

You have to hear a southern accent when you think of Penn Warren. He had a gaunt and striking face and he had a glass eye that gave him a stern look quite at variance with his down-home belittlement: “We don’t want poetry lovers in this class. Some people love poetry, they love it. I love poetry, I just love poetry, makes me feel so good, makes me feel like a chocolate éclair sliding through a giraffe’s throat.” That was the way he talked in class—and outside too. He didn’t change his voice, sometimes literally talking to a student outside of the class, walk through talking as the two came in, then begin talking to everybody else, in the same voice. For many reasons I am biased—he turned one of my stories over to his agent, who got it published—my only truly into-the-drug-stores publication. So I am biased.

I have heard some remarkably harsh things about him, but my experience was different. For example: One of the students, a woman past 40, overfed and cheerful, announced: “I think truth is stranger than fiction.” All the red-assed graduate students eyed her cautiously. Warren said: “Ma’am, yo’ absolutely right. Truth IS stranger than fiction. Truth can be sheer chaos, but fiction—one way or another tends to be organized.” I told this to one faculty member here, who said that it sounded just like Warren, “contemptuous and mocking of students.” Well, that’s not the way I experienced it. And I agreed with Warren’s casual “See where the conversation will go” approach. And he had all the repetitions of casual conversation but spoken lickety-split. “A writer writes only one kind of writing. A really good writer writes only thing, all his life-long. Milton wrote only one poem; sometimes he called it “Comus,” sometimes he called it Paradise Lost, sometimes he called it Paradise Regained; it’s the same poem; Shakespeare wrote one play over and over again; sometimes he called it Comedy of Errors, sometimes he called it Hamlet sometimes he called it Romeo and Juliet; all the same play . . . .”

“Why don’t people laugh at the balcony scene. Why that’s just too sentimental to believe. Why don’t people say, that is just hormones, that’s all it is, just hormones, Fact is, the balcony scene all by itself is pretty hard to take. Any time you have the balcony scene all by itself, it’s a joke. It’s vaudeville. But in the play it isn’t by itself. Mercutio comes on first and Mercutio says its all body, and Mercutio says, it’s just sex, that’s all it is, just sex, and if you don’t hear him saying that, you better look those words up in the footnotes. Mercutio drains away those notions; he’s already said it. He said it and so you can then take all that beauty.”

Warren had a colloquial, down home tone, but in any of his classes, you always got a sense of great literature—Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, as immediately important now, and at the same time, someone who really made new literature, so he made it possible to imagine teaching and writing as part of one on-going activity. He was hugely productive. and well honored, but for us, in the late forties, his masterpiece was All the King’s Men. It was a best seller and turned into a movie, but is scarcely acceptable today, for many reasons. The novel was intended to be an imaginative demonstration of how evil is mixed with good, as RPW hoped for, more like Julius Caesar, than as an actual historical character, but the similarity to Huey Long of Louisiana, who like the stark willpower of Willie Stark, intended to do good, but became evil, and [they] were killed for their evil, by “good” people who were driven to evil.

The “New Criticism” really didn’t exist for the New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks, and their essential theory of teaching was—just read it, really read it. For people of my generation (born plus or minus a few years, 1918) usually held the conviction that there was a direct impact from art to the reader, and included such opposites as Robert Duncan and Leslie Fiedler. Duncan’s Groundwork has a beautiful passage about the source of poetry and language in our early experience, and the passage is a close translation of Dante’s On Vulgar Eloquence. Leslie’s basic stance—not to be confused with his unexpectedly exact scholarship—was simply, get rid of your preconceptions, and of course, Huck and Jim have a homosexual overtone. And yet if you consider these two, they have something else in common that distinguishes them from what became the New Critics—a radical discontent with the status quo. Just read the goddamn text, and you will experience what others have covered up by sentimentality or prejudice.

But there were other rumblings too, such as the now pretty much forgotten J.V. Cunningham. He was as Creeley would put it, “sliced meat walking.” He was cold and disdainful, affecting mild amusement at how blandly everybody else accepted their ignorance of history, thin, very waspish looking, but then in a moment had an unexpected sweetness and friendliness, and at still other moments, deep, deep hurt. He was learned, and he was extraordinarily talented, but of a kind that never was recognized and never would be. I always liked him, but avoided him, and then, after leaving Chicago, I saw him again, and I realized that we could have been friends.

He was a super classicist and anti-romantic. He distrusted inspiration and said that you never are inspired to write a poem that turns out to be a sonnet—you have to have the notion of fourteen lines in your head before you start writing. I always thought that this was an exaggeration, although I did think about it later while writing a poem. I was very unhappy at the time, and was wandering around the Cleveland during a lunch break, and I tried to cope with my feelings as words came to me. I jotted them down, back in the office when I was supposed to be working, and noticed that all the words were abstract (as they usually are in this sort of free association). And I thought that a variety of incidents would be relevant to any of the words, so I could do the same words repeatedly—so I thought then of doing a sestina, so I looked up the pattern, put the words down in the “correct” sequence, for each of the “correct” repetitions, and put off worrying about the last three lines, to contain all the words. Henry Rago did overcome his reluctance to publish me, so it did get printed.

But back to Cunningham. He quoted, “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourished?” and pointed out that these were not strokes of emotive genius, but were real questions that philosophers asked, and in fact were direct translations from common medieval philosophical treatises. He then quoted the Latin. He believed that poetry and philosophy could be one and the same. I remember where he used the word “conversion” in the technical sense of exchanging subject and predicate—you really have to be hip on history: “God is Love, thus by conversion / Love is God, sex is conversion.”

Wallace Stevens and the War

It suddenly struck me that I’ve overlooked what really was published in the forties, particularly by Stevens—mainly two books, Parts of a World (1942), and Transport To Summer (1947)—the first book during my military service, and the second one during my Poetry Mag years. I remember being in the office of Poetry and picking up Parts of a World, skimming the pages, and uneasily putting it aside, as if somehow the book “wasn’t the best of Stevens.” I didn’t read Parts of a World in the 40’s really at all, and have absorbed much it bit by bit over the years. And now, so much later, I am reading Parts of a World again, and in a sense it is like the first time, because I am reading it with the memories of actually being in the service, remembering moments I had felt in WW II, and I am struck by how terribly upsetting it is. If I had come across during the war, I would have put it aside.

And Parts of a World brings back to me the extraordinary inner turmoil that the war brought to many people of my generation and which we suppressed. We had all been imbued with pacifism of some sort. In my case it was strengthened by having gone to a Quaker school for 12 years, and one idea had been drilled into us by much of the Zeitgeist, e.g. war damages the imagination and gets into the soul. And in the service, nobody actually talked about that danger openly, but occasionally you’d get a glancing allusion to it. One day, we (cadets in the Naval Air) were being lectured by a career officer who said: “Some people talk of the good Germans. The only good Germans are dead Germans.” This was before Pearl Harbor. Four of us were alone after the talk was over, and somebody said: “I wonder if we’ll get to be like that.” Long, long pause. Somebody else said, “I suppose we have to.”

Now think of the mixture: that we had to fight (we had volunteered, all of us) but fighting would ruin us and the whole world we knew. Imagine yourself in the military, maybe not in combat, but doing a job for which you are not qualified, and which on a bimonthly basis kills somebody you know, and then read “Idiom of the Hero”:

I heard two workers say, “This chaos
Will soon be ended.”
This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,
Not ended, never and never ended,
The weak man mended,
The man that is poor at night

Attended
Like the man that is rich and right

The great men will not be blended.
I am the poorest of all
I know that I cannot be mended,

Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,

By which at least I am befriended.

Yes, the self pity, the rage—it’s there. I couldn’t bear to read this poem even in the late 1940’s. But from this poem to the 1960s is less of a change than most people will allow. Stevens? Ornamental? Imagine reading the book as if you were actually in a war, and, as I said, “The Idiom Of The Hero” takes on a particular bitterness. “Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.”

The emotions I remember now, in reading “The Idiom of the Hero” actually occurred in different places at different time. The sense of total despair, one night before falling asleep. I was in a room with three other officers, in a hotel in Florida taken over by the Navy. I remember feeling that my life was wasting away at 25 or 26 and with the war nowhere in sight, everything I was learning about navigation would be totally useless, and that I would never get married, because I was not meeting any woman I would want to marry. Reading the poem brings back that despair.

But all the same, I did have a chance to read—I had a whole week off between flights, for example, the flight over took three days, a couple of days in either the Azores, Scotland, Morocco, or later, Paris or Newfoundland. There was a steady dilettantish linguistic exploration, because English had not been leveled as it has now. Accents were much more pronounced even among Americans, not to mention Newfoundland and Scotland. In my times off I also wrote stories, but none of them were sold. One time I thought that I HAD to publish SOMETHING, and so I went to the Library of Congress and dug up the name of a little known writer Segrais (I had come across the name in Boileau, I think.) Found a miscellany of his writings and wrote about it, and sent it off to the Romanic Review. It ultimately got published, thanks I suspect to the influence of a well known French scholar who may have assumed that anything about French was worth publishing in those days.

So that’s what headed me off to the University—and I went into English because I thought my knowledge of French would be more useful in the English department, than my knowledge of English would be in the French department. This is way off your interests . . . . Any questions?

Holsapple: When did you go to Kansas?

Sylvester: That was after I’d been to Oregon. I had a job at Oregon for one year and there I met what it’s like to be in an English Department, and it was horrifying! They were so prim! And fortunately I was allowed to teach a Great Books course. It’s hard to explain. They had sort of a contempt for everything. The only person I really responded to was a cantankerous son of a bitch who was actually very kind to the students. This was in 1951.

Holsapple: What did you study at graduate school? What did you do your dissertation on?

Sylvester: War and Lechery in the Elizabethan Theater, and the purpose was to show that the Elizabethan Theater was very, very conservative and had rigid—puritanical—points of view. Later in Cleveland I got the idea that the attraction—all these dreadful plays—outside of the masters, Elizabethan drama is sort of a wasteland—I got the idea that this is popular theater and that the sound of it, the vocal, the voice—I got together with a woman who was an actress and I picked the absolute worse play I could find. I think it was Tancred and Gesmunga by Wilmot and arranged it as a play for radio and we recorded it and it was marvelous! It was blood and thunder popular—I forget all the gore in it—and it read well aloud you know. And of course at that time I was enamored (as I am today) of the old fashioned elocution, that Marcier Evans style of Shakespeare or the French Theater.

So that I think was the fun of it, but why was I so interested in this background? I think I was struggling really with social conventions. I was struggling to say this is pop literature. We mustn’t take this stuff seriously, I think was kind of the motivating drive. And then years later I went back to it and said, Now wait a minute. I started with Thucydides, War and Lechery, all is war and lechery. And I thought about this and I thought, Well, at least being in the Navy I heard about war and at least know about lechery from some distance, so there must be some personal connection with me, so I tried to reflect the whole thing.

Holsapple: You mean War and Lechery [Ashland 1995 and Adament in House Organ]? But I’m curious what you were writing back then. You’re in Manhattan, Kansas with a new wife and a child and you’re a writer. What’s going on with your writing?

Sylvester: Not much. It was pretty stymied. I had a story published in New American Writing # 5, and that brought lots of requests for a novel, but that didn’t work out. I became editor of technical publications at Standard Oil of Ohio, and that was a breakthrough. Then I started to publish, and I was completely free of the iambic, rimy stuff, and wrote much longer pieces and thanks to Henry Rago—Let’s see, “Essay Upon Excess,” when did I publish that first? I had three of them and only two got published—I sent it to Catholic Magazine, Henry’s advice.

Holsapple: What took you back to teaching?

Sylvester: Outside of money?! In the meantime teaching salaries had gone up. And I had made a lot of friends in academic life. Much as I hated or felt uneasy, that’s where I was going. The hard thing for me to accept is that I’ve got an academic bent. All of those stories that I sent out! I got one published—for five dollars! and this poem [in Matrix] to live down for the rest of my life—the fool among all the avante garde! And one article, so-called, before I left the service for the Romantic Review. I think that says something . . . . I felt there was an academic side of me. One of the big breakthroughs was academic! I went to Standard Oil in 1955 and I left—from 1957 to 1965 I was at Case.

Holsapple: You went to Buffalo in1965. What it like when you got there?

Sylvester: The young men wore neckties, and the young women skirts. We still called students “Mr.” and “Miss.” I think I mentioned that I gave my sure fire talk on T.S. Eliot—and it fizzled. I was amazed: a big shift in interest, and from then on it was the slow increase of “Fever Spreading Into Light.” (That’s a title from H.D. for a book of lectures I gave at Ashland University [Ashland Poetry Press].)

Holsapple: When you were hired at Buffalo, it was a new Department, Al Cook is the Chair, and he wants to put together something different. What did he see in you that he wanted?

Sylvester: Enough publications, he said, to show I commanded at least four languages and had more than one approach to literature. I had published in The Explicator, published some poetry in Western Review and in Poetry, Commonweal and Chelsea. There’s some I’ve forgotten. But I had this sort of scattered publication record, and always have . . . . I have never had a book. The academic breakthrough was important to me personally, an article in College English, was that it? on the principle of disjunction in poetry. And I was invited to write the article because I had sounded off at a UB [SUNY at Buffalo] panel discussion, during the Q & A, and, as I said, somebody asked a question and I got loose and oh my God, I must have talked for twenty minutes straight—with a great deal of passion, quoting the classics, Greek and Latin. I was doubly surprised—that I had the chutzpah to take over for so long and also that I got such a favorable response. Richard Ohmann, editor of College English was there, and he asked me to write it up, and that’s how it got published. The motivating thing about it at the time was that the received notion of having smooth continuity [in a poem] is false. That isn’t the way poetry works. What I was searching for in the article and never got to because I didn’t have the equipment was the notion of Punctuated Equilibrium from Stephen Gould and Nils Eldridge, which I think is—particularly if you don’t get hung up on it—

Holsapple: Evolutionary theory?

Sylvester: Yes, sort of. Imagine four ponds. They could be there for thousands of years. Then one year, there’s a heavy rain, and all four ponds are joined, and you have a lake. That’s one way words work, not smoothly, but in jumps. Marianne Moore said that about Jack Spicer; his lines are like a camera moving along, and then “click.” Maybe a lot of clicks one after the other. When I was a kid I walked between two fields to get to school. And there was a big rain, and when it was over, I noticed the ground had been changed, that pattern had been changed completely: the familiar path was washed away, and I had to follow another one. That struck me. I think that’s close to the way a lot of poetry or to how a lot of the mind works . . . .

Holsapple: You’re writing from a Modernist model, Williams, Pound, Stevens in the mid 50s, not iambic pentameter—this is Rago’s influence?

Sylvester: Don’t forget that even in the war I was deeply attracted to e. e. cummings, Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen, prosy aggressive people.

Holsapple: So when you go to Buffalo and Charles Olson was there, that isn’t really big news to you, what he had to say?

Sylvester: Unfortunately, I got to Charles Olson late in his career. His wife was dead; the worst aspects of his personality were to the fore, and I detested him personally, which meant I didn’t see the greatness of his poetry for a long time. And I deeply resented the students assuming that he overshadowed Creeley, ‘cause to me—it’s obvious now I was wrong—I just assumed that Creeley was the far quote greater poet, that Olson was derivative and reworking Pound, and I was drawn to Creeley by the old melodies. There’s a connection to the past and that struck me. I still think one of Creeley’s masterpieces (if he has to be said to have a major work) is “Calendar,” twelve short poems at once broken and connected, and they’re sparse, and they’re totally modern and very simple. Creeley—in particular, “Calendar”—“modernizes his lute” (Zukofsky).

The two of them were really quite different, and that sort of score keeping was a thing I learned to get away from at Buffalo, but I was particularly drawn to Creeley. I suppose it was like a conversion. One night I was reading a Creeley poem, and I noticed a shift of feeling inside, and it occurred to me, at that moment, that everybody who reads that poem will experience exactly the same shift. Or as Marjorie Perloff said somewhere many poems can be approximated by other statements, with varying degrees of accuracy. But a Creeley poem cannot be approximated at all, because—I think these words are accurate—the syntax is complete. That’s true.

Also, Creeley got down to the basics that Olson didn’t—for example his sense of continuity—it’s just, “one and / one, two, / three” (from Words). This is a fundamental notion, right? Compare that to how you listen to music, one and one, two, three. That’s the way the mind works. That gets at Punctuated Equilibrium and goes against the generally accepted notion of continuity—from a misunderstanding of biology, right? But actually things grow according to a Fibonacci Series. Compare that to—he’s scattering the last semblance of coherence. To get some sort of philosophical statement in such concision and the two stick together. Another one has a series of dots [gestures] “–it / it—”

Holsapple: I had the impression from earlier talks that you were changed by being at Buffalo in the 1960s?

Sylvester: Oh yes. I went to the extreme as almost everybody did. It was a change and some of the changes—Well look, imagine being in a class and you get a statement from Lewis MacAdams. My God! The students were challenging everything! And it was such a marvelous time. What I did [in a class] was in counter chronological order. I’d start with the Surrealists, then go to Spenser, or start with Brecht, then go to the Elizabethans, so I was playing from Brecht the “Alabama Song” and Lewis MacAdams said, That’s the Doors! and it is the Doors. The Beatles had a classical, a high D trumpet, they had ‘Pataphysics. It was a terribly exciting time.

The thing I discovered is that the test of that time was whether or not the professor’s recognized that they had students that were smarter than they were, and the truth is, a lot of those students had a lot more talent than I do, and I knew it and I liked it. It was so wonderful being a professor at Buffalo—except for the teaching! Can you imagine having to grade Michael Davidson? giving Stephen Rodefer a test? grading Elizabeth Willis? The sixties got me away from being a teacher, into being a professor, I mean away from “Here’s what I know, and you don’t know,” into “Here’s what I profess about this poem or play. What you make of it is up to you.” So what they had to say was important a major part of it.

Basinski: What were Olson’s bad characteristics?

Sylvester: His main bad characteristic was his incredible chauvinism and his mistreatment of women. But I disliked him because he had a grinning, jovial—he looked like a football coach—had a cheerfulness and he—See, I went to a private school and I had seen plenty of those types. So I disliked him intensely, but I must say, what a mistake, because, for instance, one of my friends said, What is there about Olson; why do you think he’s great? Because I can give you one line and you’ll say, This is a serious poet. What’s the line? “The chain of memory is resurrection.” That alone draws your attention. I mean, this is simple; it’s major stuff. I was giving a radio program, a memorial for George Butterick, so I mentioned “Reading Genesis in the Light of a Comet.” I gave his main works. I read an Olson piece. The thing ends about how the soul is an onslaught. The woman running the show came running in: What does that mean? At the time I asked, reasonably patient, Well, you have a notion of soul? of onslaught? Well, you know the individual words, but you don’t know how to feel about it. Perhaps I should asked: Would you have difficulty if the line had been “the soul is not an onslaught?” So I underestimated Olson terribly.

Tell you the truth, I think it’s partially Olson’s fault, because he’s got one piece which I think was just setting himself up so grad students could do work on him, where he speaks—I think it’s in “The Present is Prologue“—where he says you [need to] go from the Greeks backwards and from Melville forwards. You get rid of your parents; you get rid of culture, you know, all this extreme stuff which he didn’t believe—But he’s dying and Charles Boer reports him quoting Shakespeare! Shakespeare falls right in the middle! Well, he’s right also. Olson wanted to break the spell of overly rigid abstractions and for the Olsonites, back in the sixties, the chief devil in charge of abstractions was Aristotle. There’s a part in Heidegger that is very close to Olson, where he talks about how Latin brought Greek into a kind of abstract speculation and how damaging that has been for Western Culture. Reading Aristotle in Greek is closer to the feeling of speech than it is to analytical classification. For example, in the Prior Analytics there was one passage where there’s a list of prepositions—with no cases—and translated into categories—you see?

Holsapple: Not really!

Sylvester: I’ll have to send it to you.

Holsapple: Did you know John Logan when he was at Buffalo?

Sylvester: I can remember a time when John Logan was taken as a major poet and Creeley as a young eccentric. As I remember it, John Logan’s tenure went through without a whisper of opposition. But as I more clearly remember, Creeley’s went through [only] with Al Cook’s powerhouse support, blasting over Leslie Fiedler’s interjection that Creeley was the poet of self pity. I remember clearly—and I was not alone in noticing it—not a single student ever took a course from John Logan and [also] a course with Creeley or Olson (the overlap with Logan and Olson was brief, though the Olsonites remained strong). Nobody took a course with Logan and, say, John Clarke, and come to think it, I can’t remember any of my students who were interested in John Logan. I do remember talking to one young poet, who admired John Logan, about Logan’s rather intense clique, and how they seemed to be dwindling. And she said that she herself was beginning to see Creeley as a more central poet.

So there was a huge shift in taste. Logan was ranked with Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur and was very good friend to James Wright. His poems appeared in prestigious magazines, Accent (now pretty much forgotten, but very exciting at the time), Partisan Review, Kenyon, New World Writing, all of these were clearly national in scope. His Ghosts of the Heart came from University of Chicago Press, and Spring of the Thief from Knopf.

The sense of sin and the need for forgiveness runs through a lot of his poetry. I remember Al Cook’s mocking it a little and quoting a poem where John Logan lamented not having a priest, or—I forget exactly—his loss of faith, or being outside of the church. And Al imitated John’s stretching out his hands to the audience, “Who will forgive me?” and the audience (Al said) was about to cry out: We will John, we’ll forgive you! Can I read “Lament for Spring” now and block out my knowledge of the subsequent history? I don’t think so. His poetry at one time struck me as having “emotional honesty” and I discounted Al’s mockery, but Al wasn’t completely wrong. He did have friends who seemed to cater to his weaknesses, his drinking and his promiscuity. The last two lines are: “For who can stand these old stirrings / in himself, and that one too?” Those last words implying the stirrings of pedophilia.

And he used people. I began to dread his calls, sometimes on the phone, or privately at a party. “Bill, I admire you, I think it’s marvelous the way you gave up drinking.” “Thanks,” I’d say. “How did you do it?” “Just stopped it.” I dreaded this because I knew, I knew, I knew this was a prelude to some disastrous drinking of his — smashing a car, losing thousands of dollars through a lost ATM card. And one time he did give up drinking. And he told me so. Telling me, for some reason or other, was the bad news, and I knew it wouldn’t last. Bob Bertholf was delighted by the “good” news, and I said, “He’s going to give up drinking to prove that he can do it, and in about six months he’s going to tie a good one on.” Alas, I turned out to be right. After he was arrested for child abuse and out on bail, or for some reason, he called me. I dreaded it. He wanted a ride, and so I gave him a ride. On the way I said that I had heard of his arrest and wanted to see him. He said he wished that I had seen him. He needed it. And I think for the first time I said that I didn’t want to because he always started drinking after talking to me about not drinking. So my own memories of John Logan are mixed with pain and my own guilt. I found out later that some people had been more forthright, and had said in effect “Stop using me. and go to hell” and had refused to see him. Last line on JL? I was deeply fond of him.

Holsapple: Your comments also bring to mind Wieners, another poet with a tragic history who was briefly in Buffalo.

Sylvester: Hard to believe that I was Director of Teaching Fellows when John Wieners was here. He was polite and sweet, and we had no problems. I recognized him as an important poet so I treated him perhaps with an edge of respect and without the joviality I usually had for the younger people. He was an enormous force in poetry, for his own poetry and for his editing Measure. There was one issue of Measure which had all the big names before they were generally widely know; Robert Duncan was one of them. I’ll try to find the list because it is very interesting. It’s a focal point, like the 1963-4 Evergreen Review. His real difficulties were after Buffalo, and they are all hearsay, such as his signing a credit card as the Duke of Kent.

Holsapple: Several years ago, you began publishing other people’s work under the aegis of “Buffalo Vortext.” What inspired you to do that?

Sylvester: I’ve always wanted to “publish” in some way or other, and I certainly got a vicarious kick out of our son David’s Pereideixion, a newspaper he had going in his high school years. (“Peridexion” meaning two right hands.) I’ve wanted to do the actual publishing, even in grade school with a hectograph machine. I loved getting some of my own work privately published. I called them by a variety of names. One was the Dedekind press, named after a famous mathematician, whom I had first heard about through a friend. He described to me the “Dedekind Cut” which involved approaching a given number and the real number line from the left and the right without ever actually getting there. I used that name with the motto: “We continue where others leave off.” And there was the Veighsmere Press. Of course there were the Standard Oil years, where I was “publishing” or more accurately getting stuff to the printer and then to the distributor.

What prompted me to start something like Buffalo Vortex was to do something helpful to graduate students, or to my friends, or people I had come across. (Sheila Murphy, for example; Mike Basinski mentioned her to me, and showed me some of her poetry, so I got in touch with her.) I first thought of doing two different titles, the Vortex for one, and Constable Press for another, because it seemed to me that the graduate students were shifting in their interests, or that their was a growing divide between the — between what, the paratactic and the hypotactic? Between the poems intended to “cast light upon” or the poems to “be light,” or as a friend put it, between the poems you can understand, and those you can’t. The differences [between the two approaches] turned out to be more subtle than I had suspected and so I decided to use the Vortex title alone.

This brings up the notion of “accessibility.” I suppose that accessible usually means that you don’t have to think very hard about the poem, because it suggests familiar ways of feeling, such as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Accessible can mean just plain sloppy, and for some people that’s what poetry is or does. I must have told you at some time or other that Jean and I were visiting a cavern, and the guide the pointed to a strange pattern among the stalactites, “This is what we call the tennis racquet.” And if you wanted to, you could look at the patterns of white lines and empty spaces before you, and think of a tennis racquet. It occurred to me that this long stretch is what is often meant by the poetic, finding a tenuous connection that takes your mind away from whatever is before you. Now a cavern is dark, wet and smelly. But tennis is dry, all out in the sunshine. So a poem may be not “accessible“ because the reader disagrees, or finds that the poem is outside of what the reader accepts.

Today, the cry for “accessibility“ seems to be gaining popularity—because people have felt threatened, I suspect, by what they accurately call “academic” poetry. I can remember how William Carlos Williams was once thought hard to understand. The “threatening“ poetry, draws upon a rational intensity, on the one hand, and a freedom of association on the other, with the consequence that poems (often associated with the Poetics Program at Buffalo as opposed to the rest of the English Department) emerge that seem to echo our feelings of instability. In fact the poems seem to be in danger of falling into an irrelevance of bits and pieces. I take it as intuitively obvious that “falling into irrelevance” can be felt as a danger.

The trend toward accessibility, represented by Billie Collins, Mary Oliver, maybe, and Robert Pinsky is in fact filling real emotional needs, with various degrees of intensity. I remember in particular a reading by Pinsky here that drew a huge crowd and was indeed a real pleasure to listen to. Some poems were amusing and others poignant. His quoting Ben Jonson from memory was also pleasurable, and yet as Marjorie Perloff said, he wasn’t a real poet, but a collector of rather leftish assumptions. Accessibility does not imply, I believe, an explicit political position, but everything they write will not offend anybody with conservative tendencies. Even Pinsky’s “left wing” tendencies are scarcely offensive. What is lacking is Sarah N. Cleghorn’s:

The golf links lie so close to the mill
That almost any day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

But then the intensely academic T.S. Eliot can hit big time with a single phrase, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” And to conclude with utter confusion—think of Charles Bernstein’s aggressively accessible poem “Thank you for saying thank you.”

Holsapple: I knew I could trust you to end with confusion. Why don’t we stop here.

maybe you are also interested in these THE SHOP cd's and books:

1. Bill Sylvester Reads | Vox Audio
2. larry goodell interviewed by bruce holsapple & john tritica
3. vox audio by bruce holsapple
4. Bruce Holsapple Reads | Vox Audio
5. Bruce Holsapple Reads | From Skull of Caves | Vox Audio
6. Michael Boughn Reads from Cosmographia | Vox Audio
7. Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer Reads | Vox Audio
8. Larry Goodell Live In Placitas | Vox Audio
9. John Tritica Reads | Vox Audio
10. Mera Wolf and Todd Moore Read at Acequia Booksellers | Vox Audio
11. Mary McGinnis, Anne MacNaughton and Peter Rabbit Read at the Anasazi Fields Winery | Vox Audio
12. Burt Hatlen New Poems | Vox Audio
13. Michael Harris | New and Selected Poems
14. Nathaniel Tarn Reads at Acequia Booksellers | Vox Audio
15. Janet Rodney Reads | Vox Audio