"Coming of age in the forties, in the chaos of the Second World War, one felt the kinds of coherence that might have been fact of other time and place were no longer possible. There seemed no logic, so to speak, that could bring together all the violent disparities of that experience... Of course, the underlying information of this circumstance had begun long before the time with which I am involved. Once the containment of a Newtonian imagination of the universe had been forced to yield to one proposing life as continuous, atomistic, and without relief... There was no place, finally, from which to propose an objectively ordered reality, a world that could be spoken of as there in the convenience of expectation or habit.
The cities, insofar as they are intensively conglomerate densities of people, no doubt were forced to recognize the change previous to other kinds of place. The neighborhood had been changing endlessly, ever since the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, and change, like it or not, had become so familiar a condition that there was even a dependence on the energy thus occurring. Nothing seemingly held firm and so one was either brought to a depressed and ironically stated pessimism concerning human possibilities, or one worked to gain location in the insistent flux, recognizing the nature of its shifting energies as intimate with one's own.
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Hindsight makes all such statement far more tidy than it ever in fact was or could be. As a young man trying to get a purchase on what most concerned me—the issue of my own life and its statement in writing—I knew little if anything of what might be happening. I had gone through a usual education in the East, had witnessed in shock the terrifying conclusion of humans killing one another, had wobbled back to college, married (mistakenly) in the hope of securing myself emotionally, had wandered into the woods just that I had no competence to keep things together in the city, even left the country itself, with my tolerant wife, hoping that some other culture might have news for me I could at last make use of and peace with. But the world, happily or unhappily, offers only one means of leaving, and I was returned without relief again and again to the initial need: a means of making articulate the world in which I and all like me did truly live.
...I could not easily use a previous mode of writing that wasn't consequence of my own literal experience. I couldn't write like Eliot, for example, I couldn't even depend upon Stevens, whose work then much attracted me...
Coming to Black Mountain the spring of 1954 was equally gain of that viability in writing without which it, of necessity, atrophies and becomes a literature merely. Robert Duncan, in recent conversation, recalled his own intention then, "to transform American literature into a viable language—that's what we were trying to do..." Speaking of Frank O'Hara, he noted that extraordinary poet's attempt "to keep the demand on the language as operative, so that something was at issue all the time, and, at the same time, to make it almost like chatter on the telephone that nobody was going to pay attention to before... that the language gain what was assumed before to be its trivial uses. I'm sort of fascinated that trivial means the same thing as three (Hecate). Trivial's the crisis, where it always blows..."
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Duncan recalls that painters of his interest were already "trying to have something happen in painting" and that painting was "moving away from the inertness of its being on walls and being looked at..."
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In his Autobiography, published in 1951, Williams reprints the opening section of "Projective Verse," feeling it "an advance of estimable proportions"... Earlier, seeing the text in manuscript, he had responded enthusiastically, noting that "Everything leans on the verb." Energy and field are insistently in mind in his attempt to desentimentalize accumulated senses of poetry by asserting its thingness. He uses his friend, the painter Charles Sheeler, as context: "The poem (in Charles' case the painting) is the construction in understandable limits of his life..."
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Just as Williams had to fight all his life the curious stigma which labelled him "antipoetic" (a term unintentionally provided by Wallace Stevens in an introduction to his work, which Stevens wanted to separate from saccharine notions of poetry), so we had to fight to gain a specific diction common to lives then being lived. No doubt the implicit energy of such language was itself attractive, but the arguments against it, coming primarily from the then powerful New Critics, made its use an exhausting battle. Allen Ginsberg remembers coming offstage after his early readings of Howl often so nervously worn out and shocked by the public antagonism, that he'd go to the nearest toilet to vomit. In contrast—and in grotesque parallel indeed to what was the literal condition of the 'world'—we both remembered the authoritative critical works of the time we were in college, books with titles like The Rage for Order and The Well Wrought Urn. Whatever was meant by The Armed Vision, the guns were seemingly pointed at us.
There was also the idea, call it, that poets as Ginsberg or myself were incapable of the formal clarities that poetry, in one way or another, has obviously to do with. Even now, at public readings... someone inevitably (and too often one of my colleagues in teaching) will ask me if I've ever considered using rhyme? It blows my mind! I can't for the life of me figure out where they are in so-called time and space. As Pound pointed out, we don't all of us occupy the same experience of those situations, no matter we may be alive together in the same moment and place(一笑).
When my first wife and I decided at last to separate in 1955, we met in New York to discuss the sad responsibilities of that fact... I remember we were walking along Eighth Street not far from the Cedar Bar, and suddenly there was Philip Guston, across the street, waving to us. My wife had not met him, and I had but recently... and had found him a deeply generous and articulate man... Once we were seated, she let him have it: how do you know when a painting is finished (painting the way you do). He answered very openly and clearly. Given the field of the painting, so to speak, given what might energize it as mass, line, color, etc.—when he came to that point where any further act would be experienced as a diminishment of that tension (when there was nothing more to do , in short), that was when he felt the painting was finished. She let the matter rest, but I knew she felt almost complacently dissatisfied. "He doesn't know what he is doing—he's just fooling around." She, like so many others then and now, did feel that there must be an intention factually outside the work itself, something to be symbolized there, some content elsewise in mind there expressed, as they say. But that a process—again to emphasize it—might be felt and acted upon as crucial in itself she had not considered. So a statement such as Olson's "We do what we know before we know what we do" would be only a meaningless conundrum at best. I guess she thought we were all dumb.
Far from it, for whatever use it proved. There was, first of all, a dearly held to sense of one's professionalism, as Duncan reminded me, and all of us practiced the art which involved us as best we could... (the painters) know, as do the poets related, the state of the language—in a sense parallel to the scientist's saying something is in a volatile or inert state—so that "we do convey what we mean" and there is attention to what is happening in every part of the work, to keep "a tension throughout."
The diversity of possibilities gained by such an intensive inquiry... At times it may seem almost too large an invitation to accept, and in any situation where it is used either for convenience or habit, an expectable bag of tricks, then whatever it may have generated is at an end...
Possibly the complex of circumstances which made the years 1950 to 1965 so decisive in the arts will not easily recur. No one can make it up, so to speak. But there were clearly years before, equally decisive, and there will no doubt be those now after. This clothes-line is at best an invention of pseudo-history, and the arts do not intend to be history in this way, however much they use the traditions intimate to their practice. When Duncan saw Olson for the last time, in hospital a few days before his death, he said to him, "important as history was to you, there are no followers—and as a matter of fact that isn't what happened in poetry." Olson grinned, and Duncan added, "It was an adventure..."
...As Duncan said of Olson's sense of a city, "You have to confront it and get with it," not "straighten it out. Optimism and pessimism have nothing to do with being alive." The question more aptly is, "How much aliveness is found in living in a city,"...
But none of this, finally, has anything to do with any such argument at all. As Wittgenstein charmingly says, "A point in space is a place for an argument." You'll have to tell mother we're still on the road. Placitas, N.M. August 28, 1974"
-Robert Creeley, On the Road: Notes on Artists & Poets, 1950–1965. From (https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4t1nb2hc&chunk.id=d0e13096&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e13090&brand=ucpress;query=Upanishads#1)
