Samuel Retsov
How Do We Know: A Few Notes on Talisman
“For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. — 1 Timothy 6:7
1.
There are poets who write themselves into history, claiming that their poetics have played a determining role. And, after a fashion, this is effective. They win prizes, fight to have their works anthologized, teach in distinguished universities, and yet, like many such poets, having encapsulated their work in time, become predictable.
In a dream I have periodically, a library has books that seem as true as were books when I was young. Once when I was a child, someone said a book was true. Perhaps that was in Sunday school, and the book was the Bible. Perhaps it was something I read. But I came to believe that essentially books were true. When I was five or six, books, music, art were sacred; they never lied. As I write this, I listen to Samuel Barber’s “God’s Grandeur,” and I hear it, rightly or not, as true.
What does it mean to be “true”? If you believe that sounds or words rightly placed are true, not simply correct, you may spend your life in search of them. You will feel contempt for the artist who merely satisfies. You will not respect work that masters whatever convention expects, only that, and there will be distress when a work is not true to itself, for being true to itself is what “true” means. It may then also be transcendent.
I heard the novelist and editor William Sloane say many years ago that no writer could read as a reader might, and I came to think that to be a dangerous notion. There is only one way to read. Editing magazines and publishing books involves much reading and diplomacy. Writers may think that what they have done is error-free. But to be error-free is not itself to speak truth. If you distrust your own ego, as a reader may, it is easier not to respond to ego in others.
Self-distrust is required when reading. One begins by doubting everything about one’s self, and thus reads to learn. It is then that inadequacy illuminates. Done the opposite way — believing one knows already what there is to know — may lead to tradition and expectation. Transcendence requires the capacity, and need, to be alone. In this, all readers, all writers, are the same.
Publishing is distant from poetry. Publishing is ordered and anticipated, however guilelessly or sincerely pursued. Essential as print may be, publishing is also tedious, at least for those whose inner self is guided by pain and language. Deeply, it resembles law, the imposition of reason, necessity, and friends. Publishing is academic. How poetry ever became a “subject” is a cultural mystery. One cannot teach how to do it, though some say they can, so they have disciples. After all, it is one way to pay the rent.
Poetry may be reasoned but it need not be reasonable. Transcendence does not merely require order. Order is only order. Publishing and editing require tossing out expectations and needs. In this the great god Pan, the very core of transcendent truth, is not dead. The grand secret he invites is not love but pleasure. There are, of course, the simplicities of affection, the remnants of “love,” the religious substitutions for Pan and which have seemed genuine to so many, though possibly the gateway to emotional failure, empty and callous. The living god is Pan.
The world of poetry publishing that thrived in the 1980s no longer exists. As with everything else, change is constant. In order to give some sense of Talisman within that complexity, I will sketch three figures who in very different ways helped shape the magazine and books associated with it: Mary Fabilli, Ted Berrigan, and William Bronk.
2.
To maintain friendships, or at least correspondence, with others one might not have known personally has seemed to me critical to poets. The better one knows the writer, the less likely one may be swept into his or her myth. Mary Fabilli taught much. Her life as a poet and artist flourished mainly in the 1940s, though she continued to write and publish nearly until her death in 2011. Her principal book, Aurora Bligh and Early Poems did not appear until 1968 when it was published with Robert Duncan’s assistance. Periodically, volumes of new poems appeared later.
I knew Mary as a devout Catholic, a member of the Lay Dominicans, Third Order. It was under her influence that her husband, the poet William Everson, became a Benedictine monk. In the 1930s, she shared a house with Duncan, Virginia Admiral, and Pauline Kael. The Duncan of whom she spoke in later years was the young man who considered going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. A good Catholic, she could not countenance his homosexuality and told him so. His uncollected poem, “In Perplexity,” says she "suffers the thought of me in hot hell.” Admiral, an accomplished artist herself, moved to the East Coast, married the gay artist Bob de Nero, and became the mother of Robert de Niro. Duncan himself married shortly before writing the landmark essay, “The Homosexual in Society.”
Mary had known Duncan as a friend rather than as the great poet he became. She wrote to me, that she regretted he had not known him. yet“[h]e mite have fallen in love with you + wrecked your whole career.” Mary suggested both in person and in letters why I should avoid such a profound sin, but being a Protestant, I had deeper flaws for her to correct, so she tried, and I loved her for it. She preferred the Latin mass and, with her sister Lilly, brought me to experience the mass as she felt it should be done. Fittingly her requiem mass was in Latin.
When Mary and I were friends, I was working on a history, never completed, of the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance, a project that for me involved getting to know the major Activists Lawrence Hart and Jeanne McGahey, among other accomplished poets of that era, often overlooked at a time when Kenneth Rexroth was seen by some as the sole center of the Bay Area poetry world.
A substantial selection of Mary’s work appeared in an early Talisman, but her effect on the project and on the journal ran deeply, for she made one aware that, in large part, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance was deeply religious, although tolerant, including Duncan’s Theosophical upbringing, Jack Spicer dour Protestantism, and Everson’s Catholicism. The 1940s poetry world in the Bay Area was an amalgam of religious traditions as parallels to, or source for, poetry.
Mary’s poetry can be both amusing and direct as, for example, in the opening of “Chabot Road” (1987):
Yesterday on the way to St, Albert’s
On Chabot Road
I met three squirrels
On the trunk of a tree
I said “hello”
And two of them scrambled higher.
The smaller one perched on a limb
And stared at me
Like a cowled monk
With a brooding and searching look [.]
Mary was not a seeker after money and fame but was committed to her work and was personally kind. In the 1980s and 1990s, the remnants of the New Criticism as well as poetic theories that tried to absorb as much as they could from modernism to Objectivism in failed efforts to invent traditions had yet to pass away. Mary’s work, on the other hand, remained distinctly her own, at times centered on her religious convictions (“Saint Francis of Assisi,” “Purgatory”) but more often was gently immersed in her charmed view. Mary taught one to be humble, be quiet, and do one’s work. That has its costs.
Mary set an example of how to edit a magazine and not merely make it yet another instance of editorial taste. Poets who won the name awards, and were widely reviewed were not necessarily those to published. They might be interesting, and they might not. As a devout Italian Catholic, Mary did not fit easily into the secular traditions that flourished in contemporary poetry, but that in itself did not preclude her work from serious pursuit.
Mary taught by example that poetry spoke but didn’t say. Her work, her language, was qualified by her religion, and thus she might have said, along with Humpty-Dumpty, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” But the use of words does not of itself make the work a poem.
On the other hand, as I came to know, poetry is a nameless void. It is the territory of Pan with laws, as in nature, unknown and unknowable. It cannot be investigated or conceived.
My own heritage is substantially Scottish and Norwegian, very Protestant, and vastly other than Mary’s Italian Catholicism, yet we seemed, moment to moment, to be in the same world. Norway wasn’t seen until I was quite old, yet it felt as if I had been there long before. Perhaps I didn’t actually see it but saw what I always imagined I’d see. Mary lived the Latin mass and died in it. Unlike the Latin mass or a fjord, the poem is not a substance.
Move back a bit and the common presumption that this poet or that is better may begin to seem false, not “better” but “different.” More critical it would be to determine whether the poet was true to himself or herself, not a master of conventions but inventive and free. For one thing, one should not determine those to include in or exclude from an anthology or magazine merely on the grounds of political or religious affiliations.
3.
Ted Berrigan insisted that poets should help other poets. Notoriously, this country has long treated poets as incidentals. Ted read and critiqued the works of dozens of poets affiliated with the second and third generations of New York School of Poets, edited and published a magazine and books under the C Press, and taught poetry at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, New York at Buffalo, and Northeastern Illinois as well as at Yale, Stevens, the University of Essex, and the Naropa Institute. With Ted, I planned to create a new magazine, Talisman, named for The Talisman (1827-1829), a magazine that had been edited, near our offices at Stevens, from 1827 to 1827, by William Cullen Bryant, Robert Sands, and Gulian Verplanck.
Ted died on July 4, 1983. Three years later, flying home from a year in the Middle East, plans for Talisman returned. Work began on the first issue that fall. Dedicated to the work of the great Alice Notley, it appeared the following spring.
As I said earlier, books had an enormous importance from childhood, and while deeply rational understanding had been so often contradicted by experience, poetry, when pursued with other than strictly formal or conventional means, remained.
Ted taught a second lesson, practical but revealing. When he, Ron Padgett, and others had begun their careers as poets, someone — I believe Frank O’Hara — said to gain visibility start a magazine, become a group. And so the second generation of the New York School was born.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I learned from Ted, there were groups, and one in particular, establishing, or let me say creating, themselves as the next step in their newly “discovered” tradition in what was known as postmodernism, a popular word at the time. They had their journals, their members, their books. It was in fact a belief system that viewed language in a materialist perspective, an odd choice for a time in which Marxism was evaporating from the intellectual map. They might reduce poetry to reason, convention, tradition, expectation — an apparent knowable. “Genuine poetry,” as Walter F. Otto said, “is never arbitrary.” Yet the order is not imposed. Poetry has its own inevitability. It happens because it happens.
The belief system to which I refer threatened to erode the accomplishments of The New American Poetry (1961), the anthology that demonstrated that American poetry which might be labelled innovative, experimental, or avant-garde was varied, multi-faceted, not an imposition of intent but rather itself diffuse, anti-systematic. There was no single set of rules or expectations.
Still, that approach provided an apparent safety net to the unwary, and I watched that illusion absorb weak poets when they failed to see the nice things said about them as the forced compliments of their “stable,” as one such poet named those who praised him. They were the riven community of his ambition, addressing him, it seemed, respectfully, such that in his darkness he might not, for the moment, overlook the fraudulence in that identity.
“Reader response theory” was widely popular when Talisman was founded, arguing that no two people read quite the same book. This was fairly self-evident but had particular import for those who would argue that this poetics, not that, harbingered the future. It was an era in which particular metrics and other formal means were used to evaluate a poem’s “success.”
Initially the journal Talisman committed each issue to a single poet, interviewing him or her and encircling examples of his or her poems with works by other poets who were thought, or who thought themselves, to share the same or similar poetics. This proved to be a much too narrow format and shortly the journal became much more expansive while remaining true to the model of The New American Poetry wide-ranging and highly eclectic, avoiding, with few exceptions, poets who were routinely classified as academic or members of a tradition.
Ted had been known for his Sonnets, originally a series with which he was not pleased, and so he drew lines from them that pleased him and melded them into new works. This in a way became and remains the editorial process for Talisman, not illustrating or defending any one poetics or developing any argument and remaining eclectic.
Ted’s approach allowed him later in such great poems as “A Certain Slant of Sunlight” to bring together Dickinson, African wine, a first communion, and much more through a recognition that poetry is not made from a set of rules or expectations but from other factors that arise in the act of making. I do not know how better to express this except by quoting Wittgenstein in his discussion of language: “the symbol of the rule forms part of the calculation.”
The first poet interviewed for Talisman was Alice Notley. After the interview her answers were grammatically “corrected.” “Put all my words back in,” she replied, so they were, and in no subsequent interview was grammar “corrected.” Some poets spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs. William Bronk was one. That was simply his style. Talisman interviews followed whatever direction the poet chose, not a direction chosen by the interviewer. The results could be an important insight into the poet’s work at the time. The interviews with Bronk and the wonderful Susan Howe are especially good examples of that.
4.
William Bronk had written that someday I should stop by his place in Hudson Falls, New York. My good friend Simon Pettet and I one day were driving around Lake George, trying to locate where David Smith had lived, for we believed some of his sculptures might be seen near his entrance drive. Further, the area had a sacred aura as Susan Howe had lived nearby and written there about Thoreau.
The drive home took us near Hudson Falls and, on impulse, I decided to stop by Bronk’s home. This was the beginning of a close, in its way passionate, friendship.
Bill’s home had become a Mecca for artists, especially poets. Dance groups performed for him on his lawn, and paintings, gifts from and by many artists, were hung throughout the house. A visit to Bill, until his health started to fail, usually began with a walk in the woods, followed by hours talking on his porch, always with classical music in the background. If the performance were especially good, all talk would cease, and we would listen. I recall Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and cannot hear it today without remembering that afternoon listening to it with Bill. He was a gourmet cook, and after dinner would read from his works. Repeatedly, whether the subject was food, poetry, music, the woods, or, often, sex, aesthetics ruled.
Bill was associated by some with the Black Mountain school and was published many times in Bob Creeley’s The Black Mountain Review and Cid Corman’s Origin. His collected poems, Life Supports, won the American Book Award in 1982. At that point, rarely content with what he had already done, his poetics shifted radically. The earlier work was attentive to formalist issues as in “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox”:
Death dominates my mind. I
Do not stop thinking how time will stop,
How time has stopped, does stop. Those dead --
Their done time. Time does us in.
In the later work, collected in Bursts of Light, he wrote,
Art isn’t made; it’s in the world almost
unseen but found existent there. We paint,
we score the sound in music, we write it down.
The tone shifted, perhaps toward something less formal but Bill’s deep concern for art remained. This was his final poem, written the night before his death.
It is difficult for me to write about Bill even now decades after his death. I thought of him as my literary father, and we were intimate. Everything could be discussed. More than I, he had suffered the emotional calamities visited on homosexual desire in a world where such was roundly despised. Years later when my friend Tim Liu was editing his Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry for Talisman, I said that Bill should be included. We were on the cusp of a new century, a new world, after all. And yet there were friends and others who objected when they saw he was included in the book. It was soon clear to me that Bill had played so well the double life that even those who felt they were close to him had not known the whole of it. Lyman Gilmore’s well researched biography left no question that Bill’s private life was not what some mistakenly thought.
Book and journal publishing has always been, for me, anemic and tedious. Book design is another matter, achieving a consistency that might distinguish a Talisman book from those from other small presses yet have that transparency of design that that all books should have. I admired the old New Directions books with a simple cover photograph and clean page design. I suppose that had something to do with the taste of James Laughlin. The consequence of design consistency is not generally appreciated by poets for whom what matters is an essential singularity of design that might as well be done by this publisher or that.
Around the time Talisman began publishing books, it was conventional for covers, abetted by new software programs, to present something visually complex. Bill did not like them. Neither did I, and we came up with a simple formula for cover art, generally a black and white image that tonally might parallel the work inside.
At one point, Bill was approached by a “name” publisher who wanted to take on his work. Bill said no. Gradually he was teaching that poetry may have its own economy, which can free it from convention and expectation. Poetry, as Bill’s work demonstrated, is an undertaking free of commerce.
5.
Poets whose books Talisman published or who were interviewed for the journal were often those chosen by one or more editors or contributors. Some — William Bronk, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Gerrit Lansing, Rosmanie Waldrop, Gustaf Sobin, Alice Notley — were among those whose work I most read and admired. Others were recommended, some by Leonard Schwartz or Joseph Donahue, or others who contributed much to Talisman, journal and books, over the years. The one essential factor was that the poet could be read free of any single poetic tradition.
In 2014, the journal ceased as a print publication and became an online journal, substantially increasing its readership. As with the print journal, the online journal continued to be dependent on editorial contributions, but the model remained The New American Poetry (1960). The single factor that the poets Allen anthologized shared, he said, was “[a] total rejection of those qualities typical of academic verse.” Otherwise, the field was open. While poets who shared “those qualities typical of academic verse” might be judged in terms of their mastery of conventional verse techniques, no such common yardstick existed for the work of those Allen included. Beyond this, for Talisman, journal and books, Fabilli, Berrigan, and Bronk defined and continue to define the ground.
“For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. — 1 Timothy 6:7
1.
There are poets who write themselves into history, claiming that their poetics have played a determining role. And, after a fashion, this is effective. They win prizes, fight to have their works anthologized, teach in distinguished universities, and yet, like many such poets, having encapsulated their work in time, become predictable.
In a dream I have periodically, a library has books that seem as true as were books when I was young. Once when I was a child, someone said a book was true. Perhaps that was in Sunday school, and the book was the Bible. Perhaps it was something I read. But I came to believe that essentially books were true. When I was five or six, books, music, art were sacred; they never lied. As I write this, I listen to Samuel Barber’s “God’s Grandeur,” and I hear it, rightly or not, as true.
What does it mean to be “true”? If you believe that sounds or words rightly placed are true, not simply correct, you may spend your life in search of them. You will feel contempt for the artist who merely satisfies. You will not respect work that masters whatever convention expects, only that, and there will be distress when a work is not true to itself, for being true to itself is what “true” means. It may then also be transcendent.
I heard the novelist and editor William Sloane say many years ago that no writer could read as a reader might, and I came to think that to be a dangerous notion. There is only one way to read. Editing magazines and publishing books involves much reading and diplomacy. Writers may think that what they have done is error-free. But to be error-free is not itself to speak truth. If you distrust your own ego, as a reader may, it is easier not to respond to ego in others.
Self-distrust is required when reading. One begins by doubting everything about one’s self, and thus reads to learn. It is then that inadequacy illuminates. Done the opposite way — believing one knows already what there is to know — may lead to tradition and expectation. Transcendence requires the capacity, and need, to be alone. In this, all readers, all writers, are the same.
Publishing is distant from poetry. Publishing is ordered and anticipated, however guilelessly or sincerely pursued. Essential as print may be, publishing is also tedious, at least for those whose inner self is guided by pain and language. Deeply, it resembles law, the imposition of reason, necessity, and friends. Publishing is academic. How poetry ever became a “subject” is a cultural mystery. One cannot teach how to do it, though some say they can, so they have disciples. After all, it is one way to pay the rent.
Poetry may be reasoned but it need not be reasonable. Transcendence does not merely require order. Order is only order. Publishing and editing require tossing out expectations and needs. In this the great god Pan, the very core of transcendent truth, is not dead. The grand secret he invites is not love but pleasure. There are, of course, the simplicities of affection, the remnants of “love,” the religious substitutions for Pan and which have seemed genuine to so many, though possibly the gateway to emotional failure, empty and callous. The living god is Pan.
The world of poetry publishing that thrived in the 1980s no longer exists. As with everything else, change is constant. In order to give some sense of Talisman within that complexity, I will sketch three figures who in very different ways helped shape the magazine and books associated with it: Mary Fabilli, Ted Berrigan, and William Bronk.
2.
To maintain friendships, or at least correspondence, with others one might not have known personally has seemed to me critical to poets. The better one knows the writer, the less likely one may be swept into his or her myth. Mary Fabilli taught much. Her life as a poet and artist flourished mainly in the 1940s, though she continued to write and publish nearly until her death in 2011. Her principal book, Aurora Bligh and Early Poems did not appear until 1968 when it was published with Robert Duncan’s assistance. Periodically, volumes of new poems appeared later.
I knew Mary as a devout Catholic, a member of the Lay Dominicans, Third Order. It was under her influence that her husband, the poet William Everson, became a Benedictine monk. In the 1930s, she shared a house with Duncan, Virginia Admiral, and Pauline Kael. The Duncan of whom she spoke in later years was the young man who considered going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. A good Catholic, she could not countenance his homosexuality and told him so. His uncollected poem, “In Perplexity,” says she "suffers the thought of me in hot hell.” Admiral, an accomplished artist herself, moved to the East Coast, married the gay artist Bob de Nero, and became the mother of Robert de Niro. Duncan himself married shortly before writing the landmark essay, “The Homosexual in Society.”
Mary had known Duncan as a friend rather than as the great poet he became. She wrote to me, that she regretted he had not known him. yet“[h]e mite have fallen in love with you + wrecked your whole career.” Mary suggested both in person and in letters why I should avoid such a profound sin, but being a Protestant, I had deeper flaws for her to correct, so she tried, and I loved her for it. She preferred the Latin mass and, with her sister Lilly, brought me to experience the mass as she felt it should be done. Fittingly her requiem mass was in Latin.
When Mary and I were friends, I was working on a history, never completed, of the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance, a project that for me involved getting to know the major Activists Lawrence Hart and Jeanne McGahey, among other accomplished poets of that era, often overlooked at a time when Kenneth Rexroth was seen by some as the sole center of the Bay Area poetry world.
A substantial selection of Mary’s work appeared in an early Talisman, but her effect on the project and on the journal ran deeply, for she made one aware that, in large part, the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance was deeply religious, although tolerant, including Duncan’s Theosophical upbringing, Jack Spicer dour Protestantism, and Everson’s Catholicism. The 1940s poetry world in the Bay Area was an amalgam of religious traditions as parallels to, or source for, poetry.
Mary’s poetry can be both amusing and direct as, for example, in the opening of “Chabot Road” (1987):
Yesterday on the way to St, Albert’s
On Chabot Road
I met three squirrels
On the trunk of a tree
I said “hello”
And two of them scrambled higher.
The smaller one perched on a limb
And stared at me
Like a cowled monk
With a brooding and searching look [.]
Mary was not a seeker after money and fame but was committed to her work and was personally kind. In the 1980s and 1990s, the remnants of the New Criticism as well as poetic theories that tried to absorb as much as they could from modernism to Objectivism in failed efforts to invent traditions had yet to pass away. Mary’s work, on the other hand, remained distinctly her own, at times centered on her religious convictions (“Saint Francis of Assisi,” “Purgatory”) but more often was gently immersed in her charmed view. Mary taught one to be humble, be quiet, and do one’s work. That has its costs.
Mary set an example of how to edit a magazine and not merely make it yet another instance of editorial taste. Poets who won the name awards, and were widely reviewed were not necessarily those to published. They might be interesting, and they might not. As a devout Italian Catholic, Mary did not fit easily into the secular traditions that flourished in contemporary poetry, but that in itself did not preclude her work from serious pursuit.
Mary taught by example that poetry spoke but didn’t say. Her work, her language, was qualified by her religion, and thus she might have said, along with Humpty-Dumpty, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” But the use of words does not of itself make the work a poem.
On the other hand, as I came to know, poetry is a nameless void. It is the territory of Pan with laws, as in nature, unknown and unknowable. It cannot be investigated or conceived.
My own heritage is substantially Scottish and Norwegian, very Protestant, and vastly other than Mary’s Italian Catholicism, yet we seemed, moment to moment, to be in the same world. Norway wasn’t seen until I was quite old, yet it felt as if I had been there long before. Perhaps I didn’t actually see it but saw what I always imagined I’d see. Mary lived the Latin mass and died in it. Unlike the Latin mass or a fjord, the poem is not a substance.
Move back a bit and the common presumption that this poet or that is better may begin to seem false, not “better” but “different.” More critical it would be to determine whether the poet was true to himself or herself, not a master of conventions but inventive and free. For one thing, one should not determine those to include in or exclude from an anthology or magazine merely on the grounds of political or religious affiliations.
3.
Ted Berrigan insisted that poets should help other poets. Notoriously, this country has long treated poets as incidentals. Ted read and critiqued the works of dozens of poets affiliated with the second and third generations of New York School of Poets, edited and published a magazine and books under the C Press, and taught poetry at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, New York at Buffalo, and Northeastern Illinois as well as at Yale, Stevens, the University of Essex, and the Naropa Institute. With Ted, I planned to create a new magazine, Talisman, named for The Talisman (1827-1829), a magazine that had been edited, near our offices at Stevens, from 1827 to 1827, by William Cullen Bryant, Robert Sands, and Gulian Verplanck.
Ted died on July 4, 1983. Three years later, flying home from a year in the Middle East, plans for Talisman returned. Work began on the first issue that fall. Dedicated to the work of the great Alice Notley, it appeared the following spring.
As I said earlier, books had an enormous importance from childhood, and while deeply rational understanding had been so often contradicted by experience, poetry, when pursued with other than strictly formal or conventional means, remained.
Ted taught a second lesson, practical but revealing. When he, Ron Padgett, and others had begun their careers as poets, someone — I believe Frank O’Hara — said to gain visibility start a magazine, become a group. And so the second generation of the New York School was born.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I learned from Ted, there were groups, and one in particular, establishing, or let me say creating, themselves as the next step in their newly “discovered” tradition in what was known as postmodernism, a popular word at the time. They had their journals, their members, their books. It was in fact a belief system that viewed language in a materialist perspective, an odd choice for a time in which Marxism was evaporating from the intellectual map. They might reduce poetry to reason, convention, tradition, expectation — an apparent knowable. “Genuine poetry,” as Walter F. Otto said, “is never arbitrary.” Yet the order is not imposed. Poetry has its own inevitability. It happens because it happens.
The belief system to which I refer threatened to erode the accomplishments of The New American Poetry (1961), the anthology that demonstrated that American poetry which might be labelled innovative, experimental, or avant-garde was varied, multi-faceted, not an imposition of intent but rather itself diffuse, anti-systematic. There was no single set of rules or expectations.
Still, that approach provided an apparent safety net to the unwary, and I watched that illusion absorb weak poets when they failed to see the nice things said about them as the forced compliments of their “stable,” as one such poet named those who praised him. They were the riven community of his ambition, addressing him, it seemed, respectfully, such that in his darkness he might not, for the moment, overlook the fraudulence in that identity.
“Reader response theory” was widely popular when Talisman was founded, arguing that no two people read quite the same book. This was fairly self-evident but had particular import for those who would argue that this poetics, not that, harbingered the future. It was an era in which particular metrics and other formal means were used to evaluate a poem’s “success.”
Initially the journal Talisman committed each issue to a single poet, interviewing him or her and encircling examples of his or her poems with works by other poets who were thought, or who thought themselves, to share the same or similar poetics. This proved to be a much too narrow format and shortly the journal became much more expansive while remaining true to the model of The New American Poetry wide-ranging and highly eclectic, avoiding, with few exceptions, poets who were routinely classified as academic or members of a tradition.
Ted had been known for his Sonnets, originally a series with which he was not pleased, and so he drew lines from them that pleased him and melded them into new works. This in a way became and remains the editorial process for Talisman, not illustrating or defending any one poetics or developing any argument and remaining eclectic.
Ted’s approach allowed him later in such great poems as “A Certain Slant of Sunlight” to bring together Dickinson, African wine, a first communion, and much more through a recognition that poetry is not made from a set of rules or expectations but from other factors that arise in the act of making. I do not know how better to express this except by quoting Wittgenstein in his discussion of language: “the symbol of the rule forms part of the calculation.”
The first poet interviewed for Talisman was Alice Notley. After the interview her answers were grammatically “corrected.” “Put all my words back in,” she replied, so they were, and in no subsequent interview was grammar “corrected.” Some poets spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs. William Bronk was one. That was simply his style. Talisman interviews followed whatever direction the poet chose, not a direction chosen by the interviewer. The results could be an important insight into the poet’s work at the time. The interviews with Bronk and the wonderful Susan Howe are especially good examples of that.
4.
William Bronk had written that someday I should stop by his place in Hudson Falls, New York. My good friend Simon Pettet and I one day were driving around Lake George, trying to locate where David Smith had lived, for we believed some of his sculptures might be seen near his entrance drive. Further, the area had a sacred aura as Susan Howe had lived nearby and written there about Thoreau.
The drive home took us near Hudson Falls and, on impulse, I decided to stop by Bronk’s home. This was the beginning of a close, in its way passionate, friendship.
Bill’s home had become a Mecca for artists, especially poets. Dance groups performed for him on his lawn, and paintings, gifts from and by many artists, were hung throughout the house. A visit to Bill, until his health started to fail, usually began with a walk in the woods, followed by hours talking on his porch, always with classical music in the background. If the performance were especially good, all talk would cease, and we would listen. I recall Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and cannot hear it today without remembering that afternoon listening to it with Bill. He was a gourmet cook, and after dinner would read from his works. Repeatedly, whether the subject was food, poetry, music, the woods, or, often, sex, aesthetics ruled.
Bill was associated by some with the Black Mountain school and was published many times in Bob Creeley’s The Black Mountain Review and Cid Corman’s Origin. His collected poems, Life Supports, won the American Book Award in 1982. At that point, rarely content with what he had already done, his poetics shifted radically. The earlier work was attentive to formalist issues as in “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox”:
Death dominates my mind. I
Do not stop thinking how time will stop,
How time has stopped, does stop. Those dead --
Their done time. Time does us in.
In the later work, collected in Bursts of Light, he wrote,
Art isn’t made; it’s in the world almost
unseen but found existent there. We paint,
we score the sound in music, we write it down.
The tone shifted, perhaps toward something less formal but Bill’s deep concern for art remained. This was his final poem, written the night before his death.
It is difficult for me to write about Bill even now decades after his death. I thought of him as my literary father, and we were intimate. Everything could be discussed. More than I, he had suffered the emotional calamities visited on homosexual desire in a world where such was roundly despised. Years later when my friend Tim Liu was editing his Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry for Talisman, I said that Bill should be included. We were on the cusp of a new century, a new world, after all. And yet there were friends and others who objected when they saw he was included in the book. It was soon clear to me that Bill had played so well the double life that even those who felt they were close to him had not known the whole of it. Lyman Gilmore’s well researched biography left no question that Bill’s private life was not what some mistakenly thought.
Book and journal publishing has always been, for me, anemic and tedious. Book design is another matter, achieving a consistency that might distinguish a Talisman book from those from other small presses yet have that transparency of design that that all books should have. I admired the old New Directions books with a simple cover photograph and clean page design. I suppose that had something to do with the taste of James Laughlin. The consequence of design consistency is not generally appreciated by poets for whom what matters is an essential singularity of design that might as well be done by this publisher or that.
Around the time Talisman began publishing books, it was conventional for covers, abetted by new software programs, to present something visually complex. Bill did not like them. Neither did I, and we came up with a simple formula for cover art, generally a black and white image that tonally might parallel the work inside.
At one point, Bill was approached by a “name” publisher who wanted to take on his work. Bill said no. Gradually he was teaching that poetry may have its own economy, which can free it from convention and expectation. Poetry, as Bill’s work demonstrated, is an undertaking free of commerce.
5.
Poets whose books Talisman published or who were interviewed for the journal were often those chosen by one or more editors or contributors. Some — William Bronk, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Gerrit Lansing, Rosmanie Waldrop, Gustaf Sobin, Alice Notley — were among those whose work I most read and admired. Others were recommended, some by Leonard Schwartz or Joseph Donahue, or others who contributed much to Talisman, journal and books, over the years. The one essential factor was that the poet could be read free of any single poetic tradition.
In 2014, the journal ceased as a print publication and became an online journal, substantially increasing its readership. As with the print journal, the online journal continued to be dependent on editorial contributions, but the model remained The New American Poetry (1960). The single factor that the poets Allen anthologized shared, he said, was “[a] total rejection of those qualities typical of academic verse.” Otherwise, the field was open. While poets who shared “those qualities typical of academic verse” might be judged in terms of their mastery of conventional verse techniques, no such common yardstick existed for the work of those Allen included. Beyond this, for Talisman, journal and books, Fabilli, Berrigan, and Bronk defined and continue to define the ground.