Rothenberg and Mac Low

Jerome Rothenberg has a new blog, and one of his first entries is about his relationship with Jackson Mac Low. Here's part of Jerry's entry:

I met Jackson Mac Low in 1960 or 1961, through the intervention, as I recall it, of Diane Wakoski. She had come to New York with LaMonte Young & there was clearly a connection between Jackson & LaMonte through an avant-garde that was centered on John Cage’s presence in New York & the international connections delineated by Fluxus. My first response to Jackson’s aleatory/chance experiments was a degree of puzzlement but a sense beneath that that something real & important was taking place. I fell for him first at a reading in which he introduced the first several of his Light Poems, impressed enough by those so that whatever else he did entered at once into the realm of my possibilities. And this was enhanced still more when he drew me into performing with him (as he did with many others) or, conversely, when he gave himself willingly to my own early attempts (circa 1969 or 70) at fusing poetry with performance. I often performed with him in his Gathas, & he was one of my performers (along with David Antin & Rochelle Owens) in a staged & recorded presentation of “primitive & archaic poetry” (circa 1967) that was the direct forerunner to Technicians of the Sacred.

There's more there, and here's the link to the rest of the entry.

poet says: extremism is no vice

The line that would put Barry Goldwater far to the anticommunist right in '64 was the same uttered by the popularly revered poet Kahlil Gibran (1883- 1931) in a book published in 1960 called "'Narcotics and Dissecting Knives,' Thoughts and Meditations":

"In battling evil," Gibran had written, "excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath."

attended Greenwich Village University

Susan (Suze) Rotolo graduated high school in 1960. Her parents were communists (her dad dead by then, her mom quite active still although heading toward alcoholism). Suze didn't really think seriously about college. It was the time: she began subwaying in to lower Manhattan and eventually didn't take the return train--just stayed. Met Bob Dylan in '61 and was with him, mostly on but later on and off, until late '63. A working-class Italian girl, few prospects - but she was bright and artsy and game, and directly but mostly, alas (she admits to having been a "minor character"), indirectly had a major intellectual impact on the 60s. Much more here.

compact boom, sure--but fins endure

The 1960 Lincoln Continental had an engine that was 430 cubic inches - the largest in the industry. By '61 this car had hydraulic windshield wipers. They worked off the power steering pump, which was placed directly ahead of the engine so that it, in turn, worked off the crankshaft. Really unusual (and, shall we say, unnecessary). The electric window motors were sealed in liquid rubber and had stainless steel shafts. Each Continental was tested for three hours ("hot tested," meaning: someone drove it hard on the road), after which it was "torn down" for visual inspection. A computer-like device checked every electrical component.

The 1960 Cadillac, on the other hand, was toned down from the '59 model. Thomas Bonsall's The Cadillac Story reports in this context that "the compact car boom was on; big and flashy were no longer 'in.'" Toned down? Big no longer in? Look at that car!

In any case, the folks at Cadillac didn't have to try as hard as before to win the luxury market: Imperial and Lincoln "had both largely self-destructed, and Packard had withdrawn from the highest end of the car-buying game.

But for all the talk of "the compact car boom," luxury models for 1960 still look (at least to us now) like the car of the 50s. They don't yet have that distinctive sixties look. Compare the big black machine above to the Corvette of '62, here at left. In design terms, the difference is epochal.

Does that mean 1960 is still old and '62 is new? In the auto industry, it seems to be the case. To be a little more specific: designers for the high end market still believed in 1960 that their wealthy constituents preferred to look back rather than forward for design, seeking reputation, solidity, proven status. Later these same folks would strive for the opposite values--the new, the untried, the with-it.

More in this sense (new-looking rather than traditional) like the Corvette, the "Corvair" was presented as a car for the 60s. The engine was in the back and it was poorly designed (unssafe at any speed, in fact)--but it sure looks "modern" in the 6-minute feature film (below). (Thanks to Tim Carmody who pointed me toward it.) This was the disastrous design that made Ralph Nader famous.

Robertson Davies says...

"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past."--"A Voice from the Attic", 1960

poem to conquered land: I lay claim to wonder

John Tagliabue published this poem in the August 1960 issue of Poetry magazine. It's our 1960 version of Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar." The poem (shaped like a flag, or a boat with a mast) plants its alphabetic flag on American soil and takes dominion everywhere, and, depending on the valuation of the simile, is ironically or not ironically a direct descendent of Columbus's hegemonic gesture. The imagination rules, and brings over a load of bric-a-brac from elsewhere (this poem itself). Poetics is inherently (theoretically and perhaps hilariously) colonialism.

tried to be non-alarmish

Dr. Benjamin Spock (he shall be "Ben" to us, as he was to his family and friends) was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis in order to understand children's needs and family dynamics. Somewhat daring there, it seems. But cautious and ratings-savvy in other ways. In February of '60, he was preparing the revise the directions in Baby and Child Care on artificial respiration for yet another edition, so readers could learn the new mouth-to-mouth method. His illustrator would need to do new drawings, and the good doctor was concerned to make sure, for the sake of young kids, that the victim wouldn't "look like an old corpse and make the procedure look like cannibalism or a perversion." So the baby that can't breathe looks so sweet and happy that one wonders what the emergency is.

Ben was later known as a anti-Vietnam dove, of course, and something of a consistent lefty. By in 1960 he was known exclusively as "the baby doctor," super-famous for his accessibly modern, oft-updated book on baby-rearing with its new child-centric approach.

Actually, to Ben, looking back later: "I was a hawk in 1960. I thought we had to be strong to stand up to the Soviet Union." He appeared in campaign ads for JFK and believed in the campaign rhetoric about the so-called "missile gap." The Kennedy people felt Spock was perfect for them: "We figured a lot of mothers would vote for Jack if they saw him with Spock," a Kennedy aide told the Times.

When JFK flew in for a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio, Ben drove over from Cleveland to be ready to greet the candidate. Waited on the tarmac, entered the plane, chatted with Jack, and was supposed to shake hands with Spoke as they both left the plane. But there was such a crowd, and JFK waved so happily at them, that he forgot to do the handshake. So Ben went to the campaign hotel and had a photo taken with the Senator.

Back on that plane in Youngstown. Upon seeing Spoke, JFK had said: "My wife is a great fan of yours."

He was never (according to him) a pacifist. We should have gone in against Hitler long before we did. And he supported NATO and even the Korean War. But this new war in Indochina was different and he sought some role in the peace movement. By the middle and end of the 60s, he was completely in it. But in 1960 he was worried about what the mothers who read his book would think. SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), its officers then seeking a reputation, invited Ben to be a sponsor of them. He said no. This is what he wrote:

I am in agreement with [your] policy.... But when I was first asked to participate in its work a couple of years ago I declined on the following basis: I have no expert knowledge at all about the relationship between radiation and health... If I were to take any official part in the work of the Committee I think that many parents would assume 1) that I was, to some degree, an expert and 2) that as an expert I was alarmed by the present dangers of irradiation.

To put it another way: I have tried as parent educator to be non-alarmish and I was to save my influence to use in areas in which I feel I have competence.... As you can see from my protesting I feel ashamed to turn you down, but I have to. I hope you ... will forgive me."

Sources: Lynn Z. Bloom, Doctor Spoke: Biography of a Conservative Radical; Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life.

Cage sans radio on TV

The exact date seems to be uncertain, but at some point in January 1960 John Cage actually appeared on the TV game show, I've Got a Secret. Thanks to Tom Devaney for pointing this out to me, and to WFMU for capturing the video (from re-runs?). Click here to view the video (on YouTube - where it's been viewed a remarkable 110,000 times as of this writing and has received a 4-out-of-5 star rating, and 346 comments from viewers).

Cage is permitted to perform "Water Work" in its entirety. While there are a number of condescending comments about Cage's music, on the whole the show treats him with respect. They even decided (spontaneously?) to give up the usual game format (four panelists try to guess what Cage does).

The composition was meant to include the sounds of five radios playing, but you won't hear them in this performance. It seems that two unions could not agree on which of them was supposed to plug the radios into the wall sockets, and of course it was forbidden, in a TV studio, for Cage or any other non-union person to plug them in. So no radios.

TV in '60: which Steven Douglas is that?

Two thousand live dramas for television were produced in the period from 1947 (the debut of NBC's Kraft Television Theatre) to 1961 (when CBS's Playhouse was cancelled). Two thousand! Alas (as Gary Edgerton notes) fewer than 100 of those 2000 are available in archives to be viewed and assessed by critics. We'll never know, from these works of art themselves, how the decline toward the year 1960 happened. Of course in sociological and economic terms, we know a lot about why 1960 was a crucially dismal year in TV's slide downward toward what Kennedy's FCC chief, the New Frontiersman Newton Minow (great name!), called "a vast wasteland" in his famous May 1961 speech.

Perry Mason on CBS peaked just after '60. It ran from 1957 to 1966 and was a top-20 show pretty much the whole time. In 1961-62 it reached number 5 on the charts. "The triumph of Perry Mason," wrote Thomas Leitch, "is a triumph of formula."

1960 was the year in which TV Westerns started to fall. They had become so prominent and so much a part of TV culture that it must have been hard to believe at first that this was really happening. But it had been a brief run, really. There were sixteen Westerns in 1957-58, 24 in '58-'59, a peak of 28 in 1959-60. Then 22 in 1960-61. Ten had been in the top 30 in 1957-58, only 8 in the top 30 in 1960-61.

The Untouchables first aired on October 15, 1959. The Twilight Zone ran from October 2, 1959 to September 18, 1964. The Andy Griffith Show debuted in our year, on October 3, 1960 (it ran until halfway through 1968, which is simply hard for me to fathom).

And My Three Sons also came on the air in '60: September 29, to be exact. Its fans saw 369 shows by the end (1972). It's Don Fedderson's epic family saga. A single dad, his wifeless state mostly a repressed secret. Pipe-smoke wisdom from Fred MacMurray, named--without an iota of political or historical relevance--"Steven Douglas." Or maybe a political irony: Stephen A. Douglas was of course one of the greatest orators ever, a bombast in the pre-modern mode; our 1960 Steven Douglas was a shoulder-shrugging understater of domestic punditry, a model of modest self-sacrifice for "my boys." Of course in another sense MacMurray's domesticated Douglas and our 19th-century Douglas put the same twist on the American version of Protestant capitalism: the historical Douglas advocated a democratic doctrine that emphasized equality of all citizens (of course for Douglas only whites were citizens), in which individual merit and social mobility was not a main goal. What counted implicitly was one's natural standing and the nation's job was to make it possible for people like 1960's Steve Douglas to do what he does and remain in a position to do it, so that Mike, Robbie and Chip (and later Ernie) can grow up without becoming delinquents and freaks and the gone wife's father and later "Uncle Charlie" can continue to get free meals in the suburban manor.

Meantime, while the father's social mobility declines in importance, on January 21, 1960, the day after JFK was sworn in (new era!), Playhouse 90 was forced to cut back from weekly to twice monthly.

On election day, November 8, 1960, there were 90 million TV sets in the U.S., nearly one for every two Americans. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were watched by 66.5 million viewers! They were the first such debates of this sort (aired on TV but--more--really made for TV) and they remain to this day the highest-rated presidential debates ever. The last debate earned a 66 rating. Note too that the viewership went up from the first to the third debate, as word got out about how exciting and important they were - not down as is usually the case. (In RatingsWorld this effect is something like what you see for the seventh game of a World Series, like Red Sox-Reds in '75. As the quality of contest itself became clear, excitement grew.)

Newton Minow (I still can't get over that name) didn't just say that TV was "a vast wasteland" when he spoken at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington on May 9, 1961. Here is a little more context. He told industry executives to "sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." As Gary Edgerton in The Columbia HIstory of American Television unironically observes: "[T]he association's membership had never before heard anyone make a literary allusion to T. S. Eliot when discussing television."

your inner Kurtz

The reviews of Peter Matthiessen's short World War II novel Raditzer began appearing in late January '61. I can't find a publication date but I'm just going to say it's in late 1960. Matthiessen was 33 at the time. It was his third novel.

There's a Raditzer in every outfit circa 1944: the sniveling, weird little screw-up who can't pull his weight and adds to others' burden. Then there's Charlie Stark: sane, socialized, from a wealthy family. Stark wanted combat duty but was turned down, rejected a commission and ended up drafted onto this troop transport.

It turns out that Charlie Stark's war is as much (internally, emotionally) against the existence of the Raditzer type as against the Axis. It's a war between disgust and compassion. Compassion wins; Stark claims that Raditzer is his friend.

But Raditzer is an awful man, and eventually his lying and bragging get him thrown overboard - by real war-weary folks who have no Starkian ambivalence. Stark hurts from having connected himself (in large measure unconsciously) to badness.

Raditzer arranges for Stark to meet a cafe girl in Hawaii. In such scenes the priveleged naive at-sea Stark is pushed toward obsession and danger.

What's in it for us? Just another war novel written in '60? (Why so many? I've speculated on this previously.)

Well, Stark's Pacific tour of duty is prepared for completely - long before Raditzer enters his life. You see, Stark has been a student of art (ring the loud gongs of recognition here)...a student of art, you see, and he is compelled by the works of Paul Gauguin. He's obsessed with Polynesian symbols of love and hate, of life and death. In effect he's gone to fight World War II in the Allied navy for the wrong reasons - "wrong" in the geopolitical sense; wrong in the sense the conventional adjusted well-off American should comprehend and repress. Stark has gone to find - he's Conrad's Marlowe - the heart of his aesthetic and sexual darkness, lured there by art rather than by the nobility of the American adventure against fascism and imperialism. Stark is the aesthetic imperialist who needs Raditzer to bring him to the point of recognizing his (Stark's) own evil.

Ah, art. It'll bring out your inner Kurtz every time.

restoring etiquette at Bread Loaf

Sometime light-verse guy - and pre-New Formalist - X. J. Kennedy was invited to be a Bread Loaf fellow for the first time in the summer of 1960. At that time John Ciardi ruled the roost there, and it was an era of retrenchment: Ciardi wanted to maintain the old Bread Loaf ways. Customs had been slipping; time for shoring up. Fellows and special guests (big-name writer visitors) were invited to the director's cottage for late-afternoon cocktails. No crashers, no riff-raff.

Kennedy remembers the first time Ciardi talked with him. "I held one of those fellowships that required a young writer to eat with and be nice to the paying customers." Ciardi warned Kennedy as follows: "Don't get too smart around here--I've read a lot better stuff than yours."

Very nice.

Meantime, in a letter to poet-humanist Read Bain, Ciardi complained: "$1000 a year to direct a headache is not an inducement.... [But] B.L. is the best goddman two-week house-party in the western hemisphere. If I had the money, I'd underwrite it myself."

Ciardi wrote a verse letter to Paul Cubeta on August 25, 1960, while at Bread Loaf. Cubeta was there--indeed he was Ciardi's assistant director.

What are you going to be when you grow up?
I am going to be a cow-inseminator!
I am going to be an assistant pickle-taster for Heinz!
I am going to be a child vivisectionist!

Yes, those are all nice things to be, but
I am going to be an assistant director....

Robert Frost remained a Bread Loaf fixture, making an visit each summer between '58 and '62. He gave one evening lecture and it was the highlight--at least from the paying participants' standpoint--each time. In 1960 outsiders poured into the theater and filled up all the spaces; many of the paid-up Bread Loafers, and even a few staff, were unable to attend. (In '61 Ciardi figured that one out: he issued--and of course sold--tickets.)

Ciardi recruited "name" faculty to attract customers. The 1960 roster included Allen Drury, Edward Wallant, and Glorida Oden. (Ralph Ellison had been there in '59.) Some of young people there that summer would emerge much later--e.g. Samuel "Chip" Delaney who roomed across the hall from George Higgins, later a novelist (Higgins was just 20 years old then, a senior at Boston College who had won The Atlantic's college contest in fiction; his job at BL was to sling hash.)

Drury was a big deal in '60. His Advise and Consent was the number one best selling book of fiction that year.

Back to Kennedy and the Old Ways. Kennedy in '60 was told "that nobody was to come into the Treman Cottage except the staff and the fellows." Ciardi had hired Avis DeVoto (widow of the literary journalist/critic Bernard DeVoto) to be an etiquette supervisor. 1960 was her first summer and this helped to enforce custom. In '59 Alan Cheuse, who had been invited by Bill Sloane to attend the '59 conference as a waiter, led a disorganized lot of the Young in a movement against Ciardi's social orthodoxy. Cheuse was then "a vaguely Bohemian kid." During a sing-along at one of the BL parties, the partiers sang "Old Black Joe" while Ralph Ellison was standing there holding his drink. Cheuse went wild with anger at this. Leaped up and knocked over a huge trash bin full of beer cans and stopped the party. The gang of waiters and other young writers derided Ciardi's authority, smoked pot, held unauthorized meetings (my god!), and bolding invited themselves to the faculty-only/fellows-only parties. This culminated in '59, the summer of the "Old Black Joe" incident. And then, for '60, Ciardi found ways to restore social order and literary hierarchy. All was well at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference for a long while.

Above: X. J. Kennedy (left) and poet Claire McAllister with Robert Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, August 1960

ourselves to know (indeed)

Bestsellers in fiction for the year:

1. Advise and Consent, Allen Drury
2. Hawaii, James A. Michener
3. The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
4. The Chapman Report, Irving Wallace
5. Ourselves To Know, John O'Hara
6. The Constant Image, Marcia Davenport
7. The Lovely Ambition, Mary Ellen Chase
8. The Listener, Taylor Caldwell
9. Trustee from the Toolroom, Nevil Shute
10. Sermons and Soda-Water, John O'Hara

And in nonfiction:

1. Folk Medicine, D. C. Jarvis
2. Better Homes and Gardens First Aid for Your Family
3. The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook
4. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, Alexander King
5. Better Homes and Gardens Dessert Book
6. Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Ideas
7. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
8. The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
9. I Kid You Not, Jack Paar
10. Between You, Me and the Gatepost, Pat Boone

upbeat and tough at Cosmo

In August '60 Cosmopolitan ran an essay by Richard Gehman called "The Language of Love." Poetry is back in America...because American readers are realizing that it's about robust human passion.

"It is only in recent years that Americans in mass have become aware of the vitality of this form of literature and of the rewards it has to offer them." Previously poetry was being "poorly taught, taught by rote, or taught with emphasis on scholarship and research rather than on emotion and appreciation."

Fortunately the "prototype" of the "dreamy-eyed aesthete with golden curls" is dead. It "had only a short life in an excessively effete era."

"Never forget that Shelley was six feet tall"! And that Ted Roethke "once worked in a pickle factory."

Americans "prefer robust and virile heroes" and thus poets should be "elevated...to eminence."

And what about Eliot? A whimp? A Girly Man? A solitary, weak-stomached fellow who "pine[s] for inspiration"? Naw. Gehman here celebrates an anecdote he'd recently heard about T. S. Eliot: the poet, at dinner at his London club, gamely eats "game pie...full of beaks and shot, or a cut off the joint and two veg," and then after dinner roughly grabs a hunk of cheese the size "of a baby's head," stabbing with a knife the whole piece and then eats "the whole goddmaned thing." Thus proving...what? That Eliot is one of those "robust and virile" men who should affirm Americans' emergent view of American poets as regular good-guy American heroes whose stature and rough experience enable them to emote in regular good-guy ways.

And let's not forget Irving Layton (never mind that he's Canadian). After all, Layton is a "towering man" who "once shoveled coal" and fought "bare-knuckled every day" as a kid and--this really gives him credentials--refused to mourn his lousy father.

Bizarrely (and without transition) Allen Ginsberg joins this list of normative strapping real-guy poets: after all, he's so passionately into reading his poetry that sometimes he strips off his shirt, showing bare chest (hairy chest, doubltess is the implication).

"Hard" is the word here. Poets are hard folks. Poems are hardy expressions of human emotion. Powerful and hard. And...here's the key point..."true poetry is hard work."

And hard American work in support of the poet fits here as well. After all, isn't it true that "publicity sells poetry"?

America, the poets (and Madison Avenue ad men) are putting their virile shoulders to the wheel!

didactic poem not a poem

A more or less randomly chosen academic book from 1960: Gordon E. Bigelow's Rhetoric and American poetry of the early national period, published by the University of Florida Press - a 77-page monograph, number 4 in Florida's "Humanities" series. "During msot of Western literary history," Bigelow begins, "rhetoric and poetic [sic] have lain close together, sometimes merging so completely for centuries at a time as to be virtually indistinguishable" ... but not so in America. Although there was much rhetoric written especially for political conversation, writers of the early U.S. did not have the willingness to devote themselves to writing poetry because (primarily) British writers were their competition. Poetry that was written in the early U.S. was done mostly to excite narrowly targeted audiences specifically for political or religious events of the day. American poetry began by being "vigorous" yet "dull" and makes "dull reading today." The poet's "words fall to the ground before they reach our ears." "The urgency which gave his poetry its life" back then is "gone" now.

Bigelow is tentative about opining but (especially in his fifth section, "Propaganda and Declamation") his view is readable between the lines: partisan poetry is not poetry because it is not for the ages, it is not universal. There's a definitional problem here, and once one sees that the historical argument goes in a circle. He begins by defining poetry as not rhetoric, argues that the early U.S. poet is rhetorical, and ends by saying that the poetry produced was not poetry. There is no such thing as a didactic poem that deserves the name of "poem."

the one thing Sontag published

According to Lauren McDaniel at UCLA's special collections library, Susan Sontag's papers (so far at least) do not contain any writings dated 1960. It's possible that new batches of material coming into that collection will eventually include some stuff from our year. Her career as writer really began in '62 and she published just a few things before that. It's known among Sontagians (and perhaps less so about Rieffians) that Susan was an uncredited quasi-co-author of Philip Rieff's The Mind of the Moralist (1959).

There is a piece dated 1960: it appeared in the Supplement to the Columbia Dailiy Spectator on November 18, 1960, on pages 3, 4 & 8: "History in the Drama." Sontag was an instructor in religion at Columbia.

I procured a copy of this piece. It's a review of Tom Driver's The Sense and History of Greek and Shakespearean Drama published by Columbia University Press. This is almost fully mature Sontagian writer at the level of the sentence--without, unsurprisingly, the pure verve of the writing on camp and avant-gardism coming soon. Driver's book, she says, contributes to a number of current debates - among them "the clash between an orientation to psychology and an orientation to history. The 'linear' view is under heavy attack by contemporary psychology-minded intellectuals. It is said that we have seen 'the end of ideology,' the end of hopes for radical transformation of the human condition, and that political convulsions are precisely the fruit of th[e] misguided and presumtuous energies of Biblical messianism."

She is here referring to a major book of 1960 by Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology. And she's in part using the Rieffian approach to and critique of "contemporary psychology-minded intellectuals" to counter the centrist/post-ideological End of Ideology thesis, which in part attributes the politics of difference (ideological critique of the American suburban middle-class 1950s-style status quo, for instance) to psychological maladjustment and crazy egoistic desires.

gone words before the crazy mob

Beatnik Questionnaire, copyright 1960, Gimmix Novelties, White Plains, N.Y. (Harry Ransom Center)

Do you live like there is no tomorrow? Do you attend poetry readings? Do you write your own poetry? Cool verse? Gone verse? Do you also recite? In public? Before a crazy mob?

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a valentine from Marianne

Marianne Moore published more often in New Yorker than I would have guessed. Several times in '60. On February 13, we see her poem "St. Valentine," (yes the comma is in the title) and it begins with one of her patent run-ons from the title:

      St. Valentine,

permitted to assist you, let me see...

And the final stanza is this:

Verse--unabashedly bold--is appropriate;
   and always it should be as neat
as the most careful writers "8."
   Any valentine that is written
Is as the vendange to the vine.
   Might verse not best confused itself with fate?

Moore published O to Be a Dragon in '59 and it was reviewed widely in '60. She also wrote a big-splash article for Vogue called "The Plums of Curiosity," a curious piece itself. More on that another time.

opening the field

Some would argue - I might well be among them - that Robert Duncan's Grove Press book of poems, The Opening of the Field, opened the poetics field in the year 1960. Keith Newton has put together a suggestive "recovery project" web page on Duncan's book. He writes:

Written almost fifty years ago, not long after the devastations of the first half of the century and in the shadow of those to come, The Opening of the Field remains one of our most moving attempts to restore, in a world left spiritually barren, some sense of “the human greenness.” There is a sense throughout the book that an unanswerable question lies at its heart: to what purpose, to what end, does the poetry direct its energies? To “the boundaries of the field,” where the mind stops, where language stops, where our stories end? Yet what we find from the beginning of the book is that thought itself is a restorative process, that even as it is directed toward its own boundaries, it is guided by an instinct to create. “In the field of the poem,” Duncan writes in “The Propositions,” “the unexpected / must come.”

PennSound's Duncan page has just recently been expanded significantly - thanks largely to the work of Mike Hennessey. There are recordings of readings done as early as 1950 - also several of 1963. And (scroll to the bottom of the Duncan page) there's a reading of Opening - in two parts - of unknown date and setting. Listen!

2001's version of 1960's version of the '50s

Pop surrealism, a So-Cal quasi-underground movement of the current decade, looks back to the late 50s and early 60s - obsessing visually over the cathode characters of that moment. Larry Reid, writing about this art, wonders why the interest in the 1960 moment today, and offers an idea of parallels. Both eras of prosperity in which conservatives extol nebulous family values while demonizing the influence of popular culture. Both eras stand at the end of the dominance of "inaccessible conceptual art and the opaque dialogue that accompanied it." I'm not sure I see these parallels, nor do I see the diminution of conceptual art now (or then). But since the reasons for interest in the 1960 moment now are obviously relevant to this project - this one here - I suppose I have to reckon seriously with such accounts of 2001's version of 1960.

I've written a longer entry on pop surrealism here. Above at right is Tim Biskup's "The Channeler."

road of excess leads to palace of wisdom

William Styron spent a year in Rome. Took a drive with friends and beloved Rose to Anzio, had a meal at a fine ristorante recommended to them. On the drive back, Styron, at the wheel of the car, hit a motorcyclist - riding a Vespa. The man flew along the hood of the car and shattered the windshield, then was flung forward and landed on the pavement just in front of the car. The man did not die but Styron was horribly shaken. After a while, a doctor in attendance, Styron saw missing fingers and an empty eye socket. "Do not worry," said the doctor (in Italian, of course), "He lost those in the last accident."

Styron refused to drive for several weeks. And later he wrote this incident into the beginning of Set This House on Fire, the blockbuster Styron novel of 1960.

In the novel the motorcyclist goes into a coma, from which he awakes only at the very end of the book.

Thematically the novel is a condemnation of vulgar postwar American culture. The title comes from one of John Donne's epistles to the Earle of Carlile.

Formally it's odd and interesting: Styron at one point decided to compose the second half of the novel simultaneously in the first person and the third person. And he wrote on "dexies" - amphetamines. "I liked them," he said. He felt his pencil liberated and had access to surrealistic visions. He only took them for a week or so, since the main side effect was insomnia.

Norman Mailer hated the book even before it was published. People had been talking about Styron's next big novel (The Long March didn't quite count) after the great first book, Lie Down in Darkness. Preparing Advertisements for Myself, Mailer wrote that he's heard the new Styron novel is done. "If it is at all good, and I expect it is, the reception will be a study in the art of literary advancement. For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever and power which could help him on his way, and there are medals waiting for him in the mass-media."

In the novel there's a Mailer-like character, Mason Flagg. Through Flagg (who says word for word a few things Mailer had said) Styron wanted to tell Mailer that he's been wasting his talent - especially hanging aesthetically around with the beat scene and modern jazz and free sex, which Styron deemed banal. So on page 124 of Set This House on Fire Styron has Flagg say something that was right out of a letter Mailer had written to Styron - a private signal to Mailer that Flagg had a message for him.

Paul Pickrel, reviewing the new Styron for Harper's, wrote: "Styron's great resource is excess." And: "The theme of the book was neatly summarized by William Blake long ago in his apothegm: 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.'"

review: July 1960 issue, p. 93; other sources including James West's excellent biography of Styron