Approaching the mountain

Edward Halsey Foster. Understanding the Black Mountain Poets. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1994, 206 pp. Hardcover $34.95.

This is a useful book, modest in its physical dimensions and moderate in its critical appraisals. Such a description is based on what I take to be its primary audience, adventurous undergraduate and beginning graduate students anxious either to catch up with the contemporary or to provide themselves some momentary relief against the institutionalized onslaught of critical theory. Or, as the book is a volume in a series published by a university press (Understanding Contemporary American Literature, University of South Carolina Press), its audience would seem to be college and university libraries serving those students. However that may be, the immediate question of interest is how well and to what degree understanding of the three poets involved has been accomplished.

While all three poets--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan--are included in various Norton anthologies and while all three are currently in print in terms of "selected works" editions, it is not to be expected that students will come to Understanding the Black Mountain Poets with anything more than the barest acquaintance, if that, with their work. Which is to say that academia has yet to find a way to read Pound and those in the tradition of formal innovation his work inaugurates in our century as poetry. This book is an introduction, but perhaps the instructors of these students should be included among its audience. What all parties require for understanding these poets is nothing short of everything.

Let us consider how Foster attempts to meet such an imposing requirement. First of all, the book's relative brevity (162 pages of text) is an asset. Its four chapters include an opening consideration of Black Mountain as an historical institution and as a position of poetics, followed by a chapter each for consideration of the three poets. Each of these latter chapters is essentially an extended essay. To be sure, the work of each poet deserves full book-length study, but beginners can easily be put off by such length. Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era is a highly readable classic study of substantial proportions; understandably, a reader first coming to Pound might instead opt for the no less classic but much briefer "Masks of Ezra Pound" essay by R. P. Blackmur or the not much longer Ezra Pound volume by Donald Davie in the Penguin Modern Masters series.

There are other factors which make the book approachable and attractive. Rather than plunge his readers into any single sweeping claim for each poet's problematic or project, Foster organizes each of his latter chapters along a clear, chronological line coinciding with each poet's life/career. This provides both historical contextualization and some sense of development or growth in each poet's work. Foster also provides fairly thorough readings of significant poems. These readings are written in a concise, nonjargon-laden style. The citations to outside commentary are restricted to only the most pertinent and easily available works.

Foster's running account of Robert Creeley as "probably the best love poet of his generation" is a case in point. It begins by noting Creeley's relative unconventionality in this ultra conventional genre of lyric writing, i.e., it is "marked by peculiarly modern situations and anxiety and tension." Thereafter, he moves through a number of poems--eleven by my count--to conclude with a discussion of Creeley as moralist in the puritan tradition of John Winthrop and Edward Taylor. He also concludes with an observation based upon but extending beyond and in tension if not contradiction with Creeley as lyric love poet: "experience becomes essentially a source for the work rather than its own importance." (109) One might wish for further elaboration: was this always the case for Creeley's poetics? Is experience always subsumed into source--and how, in the context of reading, are the two to be distinguished? But: the reader of Foster's own text is given a fair range of poems for consideration and at least the impetus, based on historic and genre contexts, to think further about Creeley's "lyric difference" and whether that difference has more to do with experiential attitude or linguistic demand.

Foster's handling of history, literary history or tradition, literary influence, is yet another factor in his book's favor. The audience I have projected for Understanding the Black Mountain Poets will benefit from the connection made between each of these poets and a personage they should have some prior acquaintance with: Emerson. It is not too much to say that Emerson is the book's spine and central nervous system, the single shared term connecting all three poets. This should help readers make connections between past and present, between an unread (because ur-canonical) past with an unread (because extra-canonical) present. And, in general, it should help remind readers of the true nature of literary influence: not stafic tomb stones leaning on one another in the cemetery of the canon but incessantly active, even cannibalistic interpenetration between the living and the dead whose voices are anything but moribund.

I've described Understanding the Black Mountain Poets as moderate in the matter of critical appraisal. In particular, this comes through in the conclusion to the chapter on Olson, "Poetry as Politics." Having found Olson wanting with regard to logic and classification, Foster goes on to write: "If, however, he had compromised and had reasoned his arguments more carefully, he might never have become that titanic Nietzschean presence--repudiating causality and conformity--who demonstrated throughout his own work that an individual could indeed will his or her own world into being" (76). Moderate, but not uncomplex appraisal. As such it may stimulate readers beyond superficial canonical acceptance/non-canonical rejection to consideration of just what it is that confers literary value. Some of those readers might come to the conclusion that the presentation of whole (and new) worlds (visions) is what matters, that such presentation necessarily involves a considerable, if not exactly titanic, exertion of will. Some of those readers might decide that dealing with the presence of such an exertion, while perhaps unavoidable discomfiting to say the least, is worth the possibility of a world. In the words of William Bronk: "One is nothing with no world." Or if a prose elaboration may be accepted: one is nothing without the possibility of new worlds that, in terms of language, only the "strong" poet can present.

It should be clear that Foster, in a variety of ways, has written a valuable and timely introduction to the major Black Mountain poets, one particularly well-suited for what I take to be its primary audience. Perhaps the only exception to this is the discussion of the contesting of Black Mountain poetics by certain Language poets. This occurs toward the close of the opening chapter, "The Geography Of It." If only in terms of placement, this is an odd critical move. For, after devoting a number of pages to this discussion, Foster reverts back to historical contextualization, to Philip Rahv's paleface/redskin distinction and to what he takes to be the source for both sides of that distinction: Emerson. Both the book's author and his audience would be better served if this discussion were placed at the end as a concluding chapter unto itself. This would keep faith with its historic orientation and allow for further development of the arguments involved. These arguments are "involved." They deserve and require considerable elucidation, one aspect of which is the influence of recent critical theory--in a word, deconstruction--upon poets. And it would not hurt if this discussion were also to consider the nature and dynamics of that very Romantic conception, the avant-garde, in our time.

Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Spring 1996
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