Here is the Publisher's Introduction KC Bacon wrote years ago when we first discussed issuing my Cold Eye anthology under the auspices of his now defunct Irvington Press.
I plan to use this, or a variation of it, when I issue the Round Bend Press volume in October:
A GENERATION OF VOICES
If anything, the history of poetry is a record of continuity. In and around Portland's jazz clubs, coffee houses, and on library benches, young poets and serious readers of poems in 1978 Portland were reading to each other just like their peers in New York, Chicago, or Berkeley. (Or, as it happens, Des Moines and Boise.) American poems in American English. Whitman, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens, Crane, Plath, Berryman, cummings, Lowell, Sexton, Rich. We all read our favorites (and those we could not bear) whose benefits we argued. Still, as with all generations of poets, those sharpening arguments about past masters helped shape new poems. In 1978, Terry Simons was the poetry editor of a neighborhood newspaper in Northwest Portland. It was from this vantage point that he first came to admire the writing which he reintroduces for us in A Generation of Voices, a memorable chapter in Portland's literary history.
The works are arranged behind three admittedly limited and subjective captions: "Beat," "Formalist," and "Women." We do this because the work must be viewed within an historic context, even if subsequent historians should superimpose quite different labels. It is true that each of our writers here brings an individual artistry to the page. But as an anthology their work has the unmistakable tenor of a collective document. As such, this collection offers a signal opportunity for students of poetry to witness a defining moment in Portland's artistic development.
We have also added three expressive interviews with some of Portland's more famed poetic practitioners. "An Interview with Walt Curtis" will disappoint neither his fans nor his critics. In this interview Curtis is at full heat, excoriating "the established media" while fortifying his signature views on politics and pornography. H. Home's interview of James Bash ("Is God Married") proves to be a fine counterpoint. Bash is less concerned with politics than he is with the craft of writing and knowing about writing. In "A Portrait of the Genius at 33," we find Katherine Dunn displaying a hostess of views as she uncorks the writer's psychological bottle and pours forth freely. While these interviews were first published in 1978, much if not most of what they discuss is not only valid today, it will be valid tomorrow. My only added comment is "read them, then read them again." As far as the poems themselves are concerned, while all deserve comment, I'd like to highlight a few to establish our method of editorial structure.
"Beat" signifies those poems which draw their ambition and strength from the bohemian, avant garde poetic of a just-earlier generation. Sam White's ode to the genre ("The Huncke Poems") accentuates the "outsider" social bias of the beats by musing on a relatively obscure, drugged poet of Allen Ginsberg's circle. And yet the poem rises above this limited ambition to find a lyrical intensity within the minimalist palette of beat imagery and rhythm. Marty Christensen's equally saturnine poem, "Last Night," is a reminder of the revels of the night before, admixing something half- hallucination and half-revelation, and entirely "beat."
The "formalist" poets appeal more to the metrical and lyrical structures of the academic traditions. In "Mapmaking at the National Geographic Society 1962," George B. Moore combines a fabulists rich sense of dimension with ironic perception to produce a poem that is, at once, luminous and foreboding. ("Brazil stands dark/in the lettering of the Midwest," and "...flying low/like scavengers over/the open arteries of the jungle"). Our editor, Terry Simons, in his role here as poet, employs such craft elements as repetition, a strong sense of line, and interior rhyme to effect his story-poem, "Homage to Camille Pissarro." (This poem, which finds its hero "sketching/With burnt matches guileless Manet/Upon the marble table tops of Parisian cafes," seeds lasting images of the artist's need to endure, adding essential flesh to the fact that artists exist more than they prosper.)
By separating out our small group of "Women" we intend to recognize the powerful changes, political and poetical, that women have brought to American arts in the past few decades. It is hard to see where Carol Knox's poem, "The Moment of Silence After Words Spoken in Anger," could be more improved. It is a fine example of a realized poem. Knox has sculpted her poem so neatly that it hasn't lost any naturalness of expression ("The pond freezes so quickly the goldfish/hang suspended"). Another poem on a similar theme (Carolyn Burdick's, "The Icemaker") is more in the haiku style that was in wide practice at the time. And Kathleen Hall's three- part poem, "Islands," extends this oriental influence into a triumph of Pacific Northwest poetry with imagistic traces that might have been inspired by the paintings of Mark Tobey or Morris Graves.
Each of the artists in A Generation of Voices has a distinct voice. Yet each distinction has a value beyond itself and becomes, in the historical imagination as well as the poetical imagination, a part of the larger whole. Irvington Press is honored to preserve and present this representative sampling of Portland's poetic achievement. The publication is dedicated to the writers whose works are recollected in its pages.
K. C. Bacon, Publisher
Irvington Press
If anything, the history of poetry is a record of continuity. In and around Portland's jazz clubs, coffee houses, and on library benches, young poets and serious readers of poems in 1978 Portland were reading to each other just like their peers in New York, Chicago, or Berkeley. (Or, as it happens, Des Moines and Boise.) American poems in American English. Whitman, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens, Crane, Plath, Berryman, cummings, Lowell, Sexton, Rich. We all read our favorites (and those we could not bear) whose benefits we argued. Still, as with all generations of poets, those sharpening arguments about past masters helped shape new poems. In 1978, Terry Simons was the poetry editor of a neighborhood newspaper in Northwest Portland. It was from this vantage point that he first came to admire the writing which he reintroduces for us in A Generation of Voices, a memorable chapter in Portland's literary history.
The works are arranged behind three admittedly limited and subjective captions: "Beat," "Formalist," and "Women." We do this because the work must be viewed within an historic context, even if subsequent historians should superimpose quite different labels. It is true that each of our writers here brings an individual artistry to the page. But as an anthology their work has the unmistakable tenor of a collective document. As such, this collection offers a signal opportunity for students of poetry to witness a defining moment in Portland's artistic development.
We have also added three expressive interviews with some of Portland's more famed poetic practitioners. "An Interview with Walt Curtis" will disappoint neither his fans nor his critics. In this interview Curtis is at full heat, excoriating "the established media" while fortifying his signature views on politics and pornography. H. Home's interview of James Bash ("Is God Married") proves to be a fine counterpoint. Bash is less concerned with politics than he is with the craft of writing and knowing about writing. In "A Portrait of the Genius at 33," we find Katherine Dunn displaying a hostess of views as she uncorks the writer's psychological bottle and pours forth freely. While these interviews were first published in 1978, much if not most of what they discuss is not only valid today, it will be valid tomorrow. My only added comment is "read them, then read them again." As far as the poems themselves are concerned, while all deserve comment, I'd like to highlight a few to establish our method of editorial structure.
"Beat" signifies those poems which draw their ambition and strength from the bohemian, avant garde poetic of a just-earlier generation. Sam White's ode to the genre ("The Huncke Poems") accentuates the "outsider" social bias of the beats by musing on a relatively obscure, drugged poet of Allen Ginsberg's circle. And yet the poem rises above this limited ambition to find a lyrical intensity within the minimalist palette of beat imagery and rhythm. Marty Christensen's equally saturnine poem, "Last Night," is a reminder of the revels of the night before, admixing something half- hallucination and half-revelation, and entirely "beat."
The "formalist" poets appeal more to the metrical and lyrical structures of the academic traditions. In "Mapmaking at the National Geographic Society 1962," George B. Moore combines a fabulists rich sense of dimension with ironic perception to produce a poem that is, at once, luminous and foreboding. ("Brazil stands dark/in the lettering of the Midwest," and "...flying low/like scavengers over/the open arteries of the jungle"). Our editor, Terry Simons, in his role here as poet, employs such craft elements as repetition, a strong sense of line, and interior rhyme to effect his story-poem, "Homage to Camille Pissarro." (This poem, which finds its hero "sketching/With burnt matches guileless Manet/Upon the marble table tops of Parisian cafes," seeds lasting images of the artist's need to endure, adding essential flesh to the fact that artists exist more than they prosper.)
By separating out our small group of "Women" we intend to recognize the powerful changes, political and poetical, that women have brought to American arts in the past few decades. It is hard to see where Carol Knox's poem, "The Moment of Silence After Words Spoken in Anger," could be more improved. It is a fine example of a realized poem. Knox has sculpted her poem so neatly that it hasn't lost any naturalness of expression ("The pond freezes so quickly the goldfish/hang suspended"). Another poem on a similar theme (Carolyn Burdick's, "The Icemaker") is more in the haiku style that was in wide practice at the time. And Kathleen Hall's three- part poem, "Islands," extends this oriental influence into a triumph of Pacific Northwest poetry with imagistic traces that might have been inspired by the paintings of Mark Tobey or Morris Graves.
Each of the artists in A Generation of Voices has a distinct voice. Yet each distinction has a value beyond itself and becomes, in the historical imagination as well as the poetical imagination, a part of the larger whole. Irvington Press is honored to preserve and present this representative sampling of Portland's poetic achievement. The publication is dedicated to the writers whose works are recollected in its pages.
K. C. Bacon, Publisher
Irvington Press
TS
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