My Favorite Breakfast Food

Let's start at the beginning.

Breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal, the fare that sets the standard for the rest of your day. After all, what you eat then is the source of energy and nutrients for the next waking 16-18 hours. 

My favorite breakfast is a formula. As a boy, I loved cereal. I liked the cold variety, as well as oatmeal (or Malto-meal), and I've eaten enough bacon and eggs in my time. I can't remember when I first discovered this concoction; perhaps it was a desire to sample the "genuine" European flavor of authentic gruel. My forebears--several generations back--hailed from the West Country of England--Yorkshire or perhaps Wales--and I've always thought of this meal as resembling something they might have enjoyed.

The ingredients are important, because their specific flavors and textures can't be substituted. 

First, John McCann's Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal. Still sold in a rigid metal can, with the old-fashioned label you see above. You can buy it in cardboard boxes, but you need to preserve its freshness, and the sealed metal lid is made to do just that. Start with about a full quart of fresh water--got to use unadulterated stuff--and add perhaps a half teaspoon of non-iodized salt. In a deep pot, bring the salted water to a rapid boil (big bubbles) over a high flame, then gradually pour in about 3/4 of a cup of oats, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring. The mixture will boil up into a froth, and to keep it from boiling over, you have either to lower the flame or periodically remove the pan from the fire to let it subside. Keep it frothing up for about 2 minutes, then reduce the flame to low. (If you're in a hurry, you can cook it faster, but there's a danger it will stick to the bottom of the pan, especially if not continuously stirred). It can simmer this way for the better part of 30 minutes. As the water cooks down, and the meal thickens, you can add more water if you need to extend the cooking time. 

When it's thick and sticky, add between 1 and 2 tablespoons of Lyle's Golden Syrup. It has to be Lyle's, because of its flavor. If you grew up as I did eating Cracker-Jacks, you know exactly what the sugar-coating on the popcorn tasted like; it's inimitable! Stir this into the cooking mixture thoroughly. When it is blended, pour in about 2-3 table spoons of your favorite single malt scotch. I usually "waste" my least favorite distillate for this, since it's the generalized flavor of scotch which is required, not specific. Pour the resulting oatmeal into thick pottery bowls. Before it's had a chance to develop a dry skin on top, pour pure thick whipping cream right into the center of the mass; it will "undermine" the stuff and come up on the sides. Pour some more on the top so that there's a ring of white around the edges of the bowl. Sprinkle some ground cinnamon over the top, and it's ready. To eat it, start at the drying, cooling edge, since the middle will still be too hot. 

This goes so well with coffee, that it's a shame to take it with anything else. We're presently on a Garuda jag, but any heavy, rich dark brew will do--freshly ground, and thick. More cream into the coffee, if you like.

Thick, chewy Canadian bacon makes a wonderful accompaniment.  

I've probably had this combination at least a hundred times, and it never gets old. 

If you have high cholesterol, you might cut back on the cream, but evaporated milk will work, too.     

               

The Photograph & Its Ghost

There is a famous photograph by the French photographer Atget, of the doorway to a Paris shop. Since the film he was using was very slow, his exposures tended to be very long, usually at least 5 seconds, and occasionally as long as several minutes. I believe he used the old lens-cap method of exposure, instead of any mechanical shutter. In this photograph, you can see the faint blurred shadow of a man in a hat walking out of the dark doorway, towards the viewer, turning left onto the street. It's just a strange blurring trail, impossible to make out any facial features or detail. 

All photographs imply the existence of at least one viewer--even automated ones done by automatic mechanical devices. This viewer is almost never inside the frame of the photograph, though of course it is possible for a photographer to make a self-portrait, either by using a remote shutter cable, or by photographing into a mirror, or by photographing one's own shadow or reflection (Lee Friedlander's self-portrait on the viewing deck at Mt. Rushmore Monument is another example). 

Every photograph, therefore, has a "ghost"--a human figure which is not present within the image, but exists outside it, as a guiding agency. The image of the print is a reflection of the vision of this ghost--he is present, and not present. Looking at the event, you realize that, no matter how improbable the position or moment of the photograph's exposure, the photographer had to have been there, in order for it to have been taken. Photographs are spoken of as having been taken, yet there is another theory about photographs:  That photographs "take" the photographer, that subject-matter summons the image-maker; that there are forces (if you will) which coalesce in the occasion of exposure which are to some degree unconscious, even, perhaps supernatural.

Minor White [1908-1976], co-founder of Aperture Magazine (and books), an early advocate of the spiritual (or extra-sensory) possibilities in image-making, described the photographer as one who "recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that [could] direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself." Paul Caponigro (1932-), a former student of White's, believes that "one needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'." The work of both these photographers is testimony to their interest in exploring the mystery of landscapes, objects, and structures that can be made to reveal a hidden element, a content that has its counterpart in "oneself" (the photographer). This notion of an unconscious presence (or feeling), which can only be accessed by looking outward, into nature, that nature indeed contains this content, is of course a very mystical notion, one that is difficult to speak about rationally. Caponigro, indeed, has complained about the degree to which his master White seemed to depend to an exaggerated degree on the necessity for a metaphysical sub-text to his images. 

What is it that causes us to be fascinated by specific images, and bored by others? The question is different for painting, or sculpture, or landscape architecture. In photography, we're looking (usually) at something which was there before it was "taken," even if only fleetingly. This suggests that the mystical secrets which conceal meaning and feeling, exist everywhere in nature, that we have but to look, to discover them. Indeed, it suggests further that these kinds of epiphanic instances can take place at any time, whether or not one chooses to capture them in photographs. Photography is most of all about choosing; the possibilities are endless. Deciding what, and when, to make an exposure is an enormously complex nexus of decisions, which all coincide to produce a result. 

The above image was made on the coast of Maine in 1987, near a lighthouse perched on an outcropping of rock. I was drawn to the shapes of the rock, and the pattern of tide-water, but especially to the variation of tone in the water between the darkness of the pool in the foreground, versus the lightness of the pool near the top of the frame. There was an inevitable quality about the tracery of the water-line, and the variation of the shape of rock in which it lay. Such organic structures--existing without any interference by man, suggest both the rigid ordination of matter (hard crystalline rock) and the pliable behavior of water subject to the forces or gravity. Different states of matter in conjunction. 

If the theory about "ghosts" in photographs is correct, I am somewhere "inside" this photograph, as well as standing just outside it, beside the tripod, with the shutter cable in my right hand, holding the dark-slide with my left, blocking the sunlight from the surface of the lens. What was I looking for, climbing over the rocky coast of Maine? The answer lies in the photograph.   

Composition As Explanation

Gertrude Stein famously declared that composition is what every human being is doing all the time, just by being alive, in the present, perceiving, absorbing data, placing our apprehensions and movement (flow) within a context of the world we know and understand. We do not merely reproduce the world, we, all of us, constantly perform creative augmentations and arrangements of objects and feelings and senses, all the time. Composition, in this sense, isn't what only trained and gifted and inspired artists and writers do, but what everyone is capable of, what goes on continuously even on an unconscious level. The human mind is never still; it continuously shapes and orders and prioritizes data. 

The above photograph of a cactus plant was taken in the University of California Botanical Garden in 1988. It was late in the day, with the shadows becoming horizontal. As I looked down on it, I could see this composition of sweeping lines, punctuated by sharp dagger-like spines, and knew at once I wanted to capture it. The composition--a natural form at a specific moment in time (the earth's axis at a declining angle to the sun) was not an aesthetic arrangement, but pre-existed my discovery. The camera was an instrument for fixing the arrangement of forms in light. The design of the form(s), and the relationship between the invisible shapes (if there were no light) and the areas of contrasting illumination and shadow created by the light (source) was one of opportunity--my ability (sensitivity) to perceive the visible light spectrum, and the impulse to record it. It was a combination of deterministic factors, as well as of chance: What brought me there, with my equipment; and the possibility of my discovering this composition as I toured the linked pathways of the garden. An intersection of intention and accident. 

The best aesthetic impulses are those in which the outcome cannot be pre-ordained. Who would want to write a poem, or paint a picture, or watch a baseball game, in which the outcome were known beforehand? This is the value of process in art, which mimics the process of perception (or consciousness) itself, but is not a reproduction, as Stein says, but another form of composition. It may be that this concept of composition devalues the artistic consciousness as we habitually think of if. Was Picasso's brain somehow unique or unusual? Was his skill in making recognizable forms a facility merely of elaboration? Or is there another aptitude--which for want of another term we may call imagination, that guides the creative hand?                

A Tribute to Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) Part Three

This is the third post in the Tribute to Ronald Johnson, each of the first three segments devoted to one of three sections of the poem 'Three Paintings By Arthur Dove' from Johnson's first collection of poems, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees [Jargon Press,  Jonathan Williams, Highlands, North Carolina, 1964].

The third part entitled 'Moon' is the concluding section of the poem. Here it is--

III: Moon

It is, of course, as great as any

Ryder.

The sensation of sound

as if someone

had hit a tree with a club,

fog-horns, the Ferry Boat Wreck--Oyster Bay,

& all his

Dawns, Moons, Suns,

are a new form, 'boundaries of other

events'

such as cross-section

of sequoia,

scales of haddock, agate, 

are.  

'On the levels of the very large, the very small, the very slow,

the eye sees as constant, & at rest,

what our memory assures us to be fluid & moving'.

The moon is on a tree-trunk

& there are rings of growth & brightness.

At the heart of this

light

it is dark.

This is a man who has looked at a moon in the face, night

& day

dove, dove.     

Johnson is a classic unitive visionary. That is, a writer/thinker who saw connections everywhere. A pond reflects the sky, through which clouds move, masking deep space, neither more nor less "infinite" than the space between the molecules of water which float in their own specific gravitational stasis. Is the reflection of the sky less real than the events which we can't see "with the naked eye"? Johnson incorporates scientific fact and discovery into the poet's insights, producing symphonic movements of phenomena, flowing, intertwining--as demonstrations of the interconnectedness of the universe.

The reference in the first stanza is to Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), an American painter of poetic landscapes. His work is not unlike that of earlier figures such as Blake, or Samuel Palmer--it suggests sweeping, lyrical torsions and fields of cyclic interaction. The reproduction on the upper left is of his painting The Flying Dutchman [1898]. The reproduction on the right is Arthur Dove's painting Moon, the subject of this poem. The title in the third stanza--Ferry Boat Wreck--Oyster Bay--is the title of another canvas of Dove's, regarded by some as his best. Dove was an early Modernist, one of the first to explore the visionary potentials of imagery verging on, but not quite capitulating to, total abstraction; he is known to have profoundly influenced the work, for instance, of Georgia O'Keeffe.   

What Johnson sees, he also hears. The moon in the painting appears almost to grow out of the trunk of a tree; its stark illumination suggests vibration to Johnson, a resonant planetary tone. Dove sought to capture the essential forms of nature, to extract the dominant formal and metaphysical qualities from objects and scenes. These "extractions" as he called them were meant to portray irreducible principles, keys to other dimensions, visible only to the spiritually awakened eye, the enlightened mind. Their power lay in their intensity, of the unflinching concentration upon transcendent light. As Johnson says, they were "new form, 'boundaries of other/events'" or the interface or friction between dimensions of being or forms (states) of matter--which Johnson then compares to the tree-rings of the sequoia, the layers of agate--returning then, to his theme of relativity of scale and the complementary illusions of stillness and flux. In the first section of the poem, we are reminded that he had said "If we could look at an orange flower long enough//it would become blue." This is mirrored in the third to last stanza of section III: "At the heart of this/light/it is dark." The visionary is afforded an interior view of phenomena, one that permits him to perceive obverses, to resolve apparent disequilibriums, and to look through the layers of the onion to the core of meaning.

The visionary tradition in America poetry is not particularly strong. Allen Ginsberg often fancied himself a visionary poet, but his insights rarely rise beyond the level of comic-book parody. Johnson is interesting in the way he unites the democratic vistas of Whitman, with a metaphysical apprehension of landscape. He doesn't merely accept the imagists' delight in the well-described object, but looks into, and through, and beyond it. Like Oppen, he perceives "another reality" beyond "the things of this world" and celebrates raw experience as the evidence of transcendence (Emerson). Rather than "imaginary gardens with real toads" in them, he posits real gardens with real toads! His poems aren't decorative, but exploratory, in the same manner that a horticulturalist's, or a botanist's, or astronomer's, or particle physicist's researches are. Poetry is not a parlor-game for Johnson, but a noble calling. 

We shall have more to say about his work in future posts.                                 

Friendship & Love

There are two famous quotations which for some reason have always stuck in my mind regarding friendship and the competing demands of loyalty. The first is by E.M. Forster, the distinguished English novelist--

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

The second is by Graham Greene, another distinguished English novelist from a later generation--

"If you have to earn a living...and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent--and never let either of the two sides know your real name."

Forster was a Gay man, who grew up and lived at a time when homosexuality was still legally a crime in Great Britain. His sentiments regarding loyalty and friendship have a specific poignancy, in light of the conditions under which he was forced to live during the better part of his life. Later, he would confront loyalty in the political sphere, but his feelings were always informed by the tension between private (and even secret) loyalties and public duty. 

Greene occupied for most of his life a dual role, as public servant, and novelist--a complex, worldly man, with many competing loyalties (church, state, family, art), in addition to a restless, wayward nature, and a tortured conscience. The Author both of "straight" novels, and mystery whodunits (which he famously called "entertainments"), he drew deeply upon his cosmopolitan familiarity with exotic settings:  Africa, Central America, East Asia. One of the dominant themes in his work is just this very issue of personal attachment versus political, or public duty. In The Third Man, for instance, the American Western genre writer Holly Martins comes to post-War Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime; ultimately he discovers that Lime has been trafficking in black market fake medicines, and is now underground, eluding the Authorities in the Western Sector. In the course of his inquiries, Martins falls in love with Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt. The Authorities want him to rat out his friend, Anna wants to protect Lime, whom she still loves, and Martins still feels drawn to his corrupt old friend. It's vintage Greene, and sets into motion all the classic claims on loyalty (friendship, love, duty, morality)--particularly the value we place on personal friendship.

There is no neat distinction between love and friendship.  Indeed, it is possible to be a friend and a lover to someone at the same time, though complications may arise. Relationships which begin in love, may develop into lasting friendships, and vice versa. More often, we tend to think of friendships as less intense than love, or as having a somewhat different character. Love may occur between individuals for whom other levels of interaction are unlikely. Friendships may be destroyed by allowing them to "descend" into the carnal. 

In the modern world, friendship has often been the testing ground for character. Our allegiances to individuals are often pitted against our commitment to groups, political principles or the demands of conduct. At the level of the family or clan, we are often torn between loyalty to our immediate relations, and those of religion, country or ideology. How we mediate between these demands is a measure of strength of character, or lack of it.

The Forster quote seems to come down on the side of friendship, as being a more powerful and preferable attachment than patriotism. It's attractive, because it places allegiance to individual--possibly an individual--above duty to country, presumably even--or particularly--in time of great stress, such as under wartime conditions. If we cannot depend upon our closest friends, then upon what foundation is our individual freedom and honor to be constructed? One can think of exceptions which might break such a vow, i.e., if one's friend had committed an heinous crime, or was a "mad bomber" intent upon anarchistic mischief. But Forster probably is referring to those kinds of explicit betrayals which involve exposing a friend to embarrassment or punishment for merely standing by a private belief. As such, it expresses a kind of freedom which is often at odds with duty.

The Greene quotation is more personal, referring to the allegiance which an individual makes, privately, to himself. It assumes that such oaths and vows are by their nature secret, never divulged, and that by maintaining a sort of "neutral" ground--a personal code of non-commitment--one may save one's moral soul by never truly (to one's self) taking sides. This kind of alienation from outward forms of connection is typical in the modern world, since it accepts as a given that we all have private lives which are distinct and separate from our existence in the everyday world. It's explicitly immoral, or morally ambiguous, since it sets the individual ethically apart from an expressed, committed choice.  Each individual is therefore free to maintain a private code. A private code implies a degree of freedom,  a core of sensibility which is impenetrable, even under torture, or extreme temptation. It puts a high degree of value (esteem) upon individual freedom.  

It is this internal sense of the self's independence which ultimately guides all our decisions--all our choices and actions. It cannot be bought, or stolen. It exists despite every compromise or betrayal we may commit. In religious terms, it is our redemptive portion, which, despite every sin or evil deed or mistake or accident we may commit, is still within our power to preserve. It's a sort of saving grace. I'm not a theologian, but I suspect that this concept of the inviolable soul is a familiar one to religious historians or theoreticians.

It may be that friendship is the greatest of all possible human relationships, greater than love, greater than patriotism, greater than loyalty to race, sex, religion, family or business. Friendship must be nurtured, and tended, like any living thing. It is voluntary, and therefore enabling and empowering. Woe betide the man or woman who has no friends, or has no use for friendship. He/she is truly alone.  

My Lunch With M.F.K. Fisher

Growing up in the Napa Valley, where our family had moved in 1954, after brief periods of residence in Richmond and Oakland, was in many ways a condition of cultural isolation. The Valley had been first settled in the early 19th Century, primarily as an agricultural economy, eventually with a heavy emphasis on grape growing for the production of wine. During Prohibition, that business was depressed. By the early 1950's, when we first began to explore it, the Valley had become a bit seedy: There were three major industries where people worked: Mare Island, the Naval Shipyard which thrived in the War Years, and for several decades later before being finally decommissioned in 1996; Basalt Rock & Gravel, just south of the town of Napa; and the wine industry. Despite its proximity to San Francisco, it did not begin to grow until after the War. 

My Mother had worked in the 1950's as a photographic retoucher, shaving off pimples and wrinkles from the negatives of local portrait photographers. It was exacting work, done at home over a light projection contraption, hard on the eyes. In the early 1960's, she was hired by the novelist and short story writer Jessamyn West, to type her manuscripts. In those days, before the invention of the personal computer most writers either wrote in longhand, or on manual typewriters; the typed manuscripts were then transcribed (typeset) by the publishers. Manuscript typing was a crucial step in the process, a sort of pre-proof or -galley draft. It required accuracy and care. Mom was good at it. She worked first on a sturdy, heavy black Remington upright, eventually using an IBM Selectric. 

Jessamyn West had moved to the Valley in the early 1960's, with her husband, Max McPherson. Max was the Superintendent of Schools for Napa. They lived in a beautiful craftsman style home, with a barn for their horses, and a swimming pool where I often got to swim on hot Summer afternoons. I remember the McPhersons as a very old-fashioned couple, bathed in a kind of nostalgic twilight, Jessamyn aggressively "cheerful" and a bit brusque, and Max more serious, though with twinkling amusements.   

 

Not long after she had begun working for Jessamyn, Mom met and began working in the same capacity for Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. Fisher had arrived in the Valley about the same time we had, recently divorced from her third husband Donald Friede (familiar as the other name of the short-lived Covici-Friede publishing house during the 1920's). Fisher continued to use her first husband's name throughout her life, the "pen name" she had used first as a writer. Fisher lived up-Valley in an old two-story (up and down) house in St. Helena, with her two daughters. Mom didn't drive, so my Stepfather or I would drive her up for her frequent meetings with Mary Frances. During those years, Fisher, who had already a well-established reputation for her culinary works, was writing a series of recollections of the Quaker Community of Whittier in Southern California, where she had spent most of her childhood and youth; the book would eventually be published under the title Among Friends (1971). Mom typed the manuscripts of The Story of Wine, Map of Another Town, The Cooking of Provincial France, With Bold Knife and Fork, and A Considerable Town (a book about Marseilles, where Fisher had lived for a while with her two girls), in addition to the Quaker book.

One day when I was 17, I was invited to lunch with Mary Frances. Very special. When I arrived, she met me at the door, wearing a dramatic long white gown with abstract black designs. She was all made up with lipstick, her hair drawn back in a neat bun. She would have been the age I am now, about 60; she looked her age, but rather as if she were trying to look much younger. She invited me in and introduced me to her older daughter, Anne, a thin somewhat non-descript girl about my age, with short dark hair and a quiet manner. We sat down to talk. I explained that I wrote poetry, but didn't have any idea about how writing might someday be a part of my life. "Well, young man, you should use whatever connections you can in life; if there's anything you want me to do, just say the word!" Fisher was well-connected, she had an important agent, and knew the editors of the major national magazines, including William Shawn at The New Yorker. She mentioned that she had had something to do with getting the cartoonist William Hamilton published The New Yorker recently. She described Shawn: "He's absolutely tiny, almost a midget!  When he 'deposes' you about one of your pieces, he kneels on this little tuffet right in front of you, and you sit in terror of his opinion!" I knew what I was writing then wasn't good enough to show to anyone as intelligent and astute as Fisher, but it was fun to be taken seriously, and I was honored. After a while, she said she had to go into the kitchen to work on the meal, and asked if I'd like to entertain her by playing the small piano she had in the livingroom. "You just go ahead and play something you like, and I won't be in the room to bother you." I had been enthralled by the French Impressionists, and had been practising the works of Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, etc. I played a couple of Debussy's Preludes, and then Poulenc's Trois Movements Perpetuals. When I had done, Fisher told me to come into the kitchen, lunch was being served. I don't know what I expected, but it was a meal of simplicity and purity. She'd boiled a batch of very long, very thin noodles, perfectly al dente, mixed at table with a grated cheese, probably a Romano. With this was a dish of very long, lightly braised green beans, in a bit of seasoned olive oil, and a bottle of French Chablis, the name of which, of course, I can't remember, but which she said she had chosen for its "acquaintance" with the food. "I know that Poulenc piece very well," she said as we were eating, "it always reminds me of those big fluffy red-heads in that Renoir painting, do you know it?--sitting at the piano in a state of romantic suspended animation!" 

I remember that there was a portrait painting of her on the bathroom door, which I later learned had been done by "Timmy" (Dillwyn Parrish), her second husband. Parrish, it may be recalled, was, in his youth, one of the children whom his relative Maxfield Parrish had used as his painting subjects. After lunch, we sat in her livingroom talking. She sipped from a glass of clear vermouth she kept by her side. We talked for a long while, but I can't remember much of what about. She had a way of making you seem privileged by her attention and regard, but she could also be peevish and snappy. If she disagreed about something you said, or about someone, she'd speak her mind. I said I thought E.M. Forster was a very good novelist, actually still living at that time. "Oh, that old queer, he's just doddering now, just doddering!"

Not long after this, the architect David Pleydell-Bouverie designed and had built for her a chic little cottage in a vineyard field in Glen Ellen (not far from St. Helena). This "Last House" as Fisher called it, was where she spent her remaining years, alone, writing and thinking and corresponding, lionized and pampered and patronized. I remember that you weren't allowed to harm spiders in her houses, because she considered them valuable soldiers in the war against pests. But there was no militia to defend her against groupies, hangers-on, and other such human pests, who made pilgrimage to the shrine of the doyenne of America's grande nouvelle cuisine.            

A Ricochet

It's not my style to hit off of other people's blog sites, but I'll make an exception this once, since I've always planned to do a post on this topic.  

This morning's (untitled) entry on Silliman's Blog is a reponse to another blogger's "20 books that first caused you to fall in love with poetry," containing Ron's list, with a bit of explanation. 

Everyone's list is likely to be different, but most of the names and the general trend of Ron's list is so familiar to me, I feel we almost had the same life-track. I grew up in Napa, a weird little town about 50 miles north of San Francisco, during the 1950's and 1960's. The story of American life is mostly a story of regional isolations. Though San Francisco has traditionally been regarded as a cosmopolitan, sophisticated City, its outlying areas--referred to as the Bay Area--have pockets of suburban and rural remoteness that are less a consequence of distance than of cultural neglect (for want of another term). Growing up in Napa in those years was in many ways not unlike growing up in a small rural town in Virginia or Kentucky. The town had a firm segregation policy:  No Black People lived there, even though, just 15 miles south lay Vallejo, an old port town with a huge Negro American population. Culturally, it was living in its past; old Italian men still played bocce ball in alleyways two blocks from the center of town. If you drove for 20 minutes into the country, you could find open country and literally get lost. Change would come, but slowly. 

In the high school I attended, English literature stopped with T.S. Eliot. We read Prufrock in senior English class, but I'm not sure we had a grasp of its implications. It probably was no more, or less mysterious, to our ears, than Browning's Bishop Orders His Tomb. The reason I mention all this is that any kid, like me, with a curiosity about "modern" literature was pretty much on his own: There was no one local who knew about it, and no books in the library by contemporary writers. 

As a boy, I had been given, at age 13, a subscription to The New Yorker. But, despite entertaining a steady stream of quality writing, including poetry, that sophisticated weekly was less interested in showcasing new challenging work, than in conforming to a pre-ordained concept of Eastern sophistication, scrubbed of any blemishes or daring. The poets they published in those days would be the names Ron Silliman now calls "the Quietists." 

While still in high school, I began to read poetry seriously, on my own, but availability was limited. I read Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations, Updike's Verse (a little Fawcett paperback original reprint of his first two slim collections), May Swenson, Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, Wilbur's The Beautiful Changes, and three anthologies, two of which would serve as doors to other realms: Untermeyer's Modern American and British Poetry, Donald Hall's Penguin paperback original Contemporary American Poet (1962), and A Controversy of Poets (Anchor Books, 1965, edited by Robert Kelly and Paris Leary). In Untermeyer, I found MacLeish, Cummings, Williams, Pound, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Lowell, and Tate. But the other two books were a revelation, though what I may have made of some of what I first read there probably would embarrass me today. I distinctly recall being attracted to Snyder's Riprap poems, Wilbur's polish and richness, Simpson and Wright. Looking today at the figures in A Controversy of Poets, it's a wonder I ever found this book; it's also a wonder that I understood any of its contents (!), and that would go for its conservative choices as well as the avants. In its pages, I first read Ashbery, Eigner, LeRoy Jones, O'Hara, Zukofsky--names which would remain important to me for the next 20 years, at least. 

Attending UC Berkeley in the mid-1960's, I was exposed suddenly, and irrevocably, to a virtual crash course in new kinds of writing, but mostly through my own curiosity and canvassing of the shelves of new and used book stores. The English Department, in those days, was still stuck in reverse, and refused to acknowledge the existence of any serious poetry after 1920; which meant, for good or ill, that I was on my own. But the arrival, in 1967, of Robert Grenier--who, with Richard Tillinghast, had been invited to fill the void created by the delayed appearance of Denise Levertov (who had been hung up with her husband Mitch Goodman's legal wrangles over his protest activities)--changed everything for me. Bob, fresh from Iowa, the publication of his first book Dusk Road Games, and a year in Britain (on an Amy Lowell traveling fellowship), handed us a reading list which suddenly propelled me into the current literary vortex. Almost overnight, my exposure to a wide and deep range of contemporary poetry, grew exponentially. 

From those years, 1964 (my junior year in high school) through 1970 (my first year at Iowa), the most important books--in terms of their immediate and long-term influence on my work and thought--would have to include:

Cummings - Poems 1923-1954

Williams - Pictures from Breughel

Stevens - Harmonium

Moore - Complete Poetry 

Snyder - A Range of Poetry

Ashbery - Tennis Court Oath

Wright - Shall We Gather and The Branch Will Not Break

Bly - Silence and The Light Around the Body

Oppen - Discrete Series, The Materials and This in Which

Plath - Ariel

Zukofsky - All and A 1-12

Hecht - The Hard Hours

Eigner - another time in fragments

Schuyler - Freely Espousing

O'Hara - Meditations and Lunch Poems

Creeley - For Love, Words and Pieces

Grenier - Dusk Road Games

Whalen - On Bear's Head

Justice - Summer Anniversaries and Night Light

Dugan - Poems 1,2,3

I realize that this is a list of 20 names, not 20 books. I could easily limit the choice to one book for each author, but that's just a refinement. There were literally dozens of poets whose work I would find useful, but whose work was either so difficult to find in those days (as with Blackburn or Dorn), or seemed forbiddingly difficult or arcane (Olson, Mac Low, Spicer). Goodness knows what I thought Zukofsky was trying to do, so odd and conceited did his poems seem. This is an amble down nostalgia road for me. But, happily, all these writers are still people whose work I respect, whose efforts strike me as worthy, and largely successful.

It's interesting how writers whose work you read, seemingly with little affect, at first, grow on you, becoming increasingly important or more interesting. When I first read Eigner, or Zukofsky, I was strongly attracted to something in their work, which I would have been unable to define then. It would take years before I understood what they were doing, or how they were affecting me. First impressions can be deceiving. Also, familiarity isn't always useful; the first time I read Williams, it was like falling in love--everything seemed bright, fresh and possible; but he didn't wear particularly well. My affection for Larry Eigner's work embarrassed me at first; he wasn't someone whose work I felt I could defend on critical grounds, it seemed too easy, even juvenile at times. But these problems sort themselves out.

My tastes would change. A lot of these poets probably aren't that important to me now, at least to the extent they were then. Others now fill the gaps: Ronald Johnson, Charles Olson, Spicer, Borges, Wieners, Akhmatova. Certain styles seem to appeal to the adolescent mind, but fade as one matures. Pound would become increasingly important to me over time; I would once have been astonished to think that his work would eventually supplant that of Eliot in my personal pantheon.