Cid Corman: Editor, Translator, Poet.

Tim WoodsAberystwyth University, Wales, UK

Where have the centres of the American poetic avant-garde been located during the past fifty

years? New York? Boston? Chicago? San Francisco and the Bay Area? The southern

Californian stretch from Los Angeles down to San Diego?

What about Kyoto, Japan?

This latter suggestion might come as something of a surprise, until one learns of the

dedicated and committed poetic activity that occurred in Japan since the late 1950s under the

direction of Cid Corman, when he moved there in 1958. After a two-year return to the USA

in 1960, he went back to Japan in 1962 and married Shizumi Konishi, a TV news editor, in

1963; and since then, Corman lived fairly continuously in Kyoto for nigh on forty years until

he died in 2004.1 Albeit geographically “eccentric”, Cid Corman was nevertheless at the very

centre of poetic activity all his life – or as Charles Olson put it in his letters, he was a “core-

man” (Evans, Vol. 1, 8). His magazine Origin, established in 1951 and running for six series

(see discussion below), introduced and published the seminal American poets for the next

fifty years. Corman acted as the lynchpin for a wide range of American poets, from the Black

Mountain School to the Beats, the Objectivists, and the San Francisco Renaissance, as well as

numerous “non-affiliated” poets, like William Bronk, Lorine Niedecker and Frank Samperi.

Thoroughly immersed in the wider writing community beyond the United States, Corman

was also strongly connected to Canadian and European poetics. Spending four years in

France, Italy and Greece deepened Corman’s commitment to translation, and over the

ensuing decades he translated a wide variety of French poets including Henri Michaux, André

Du Bouchet, Paul Celan, Philippe Jaccottet, Francis Ponge, René Daumal, and René Char;

and he has also been a key translator of seminal Japanese poets, like Basho Matsuo, Kusano

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Shimpei, Sodo, Ransetsu, Buson, Ryokan, Issa, Shiki and Sokan. Finally, he was himself an

unbelievably prolific poet, publishing more than 150 books and pamphlets, a poetic writing

that culminated in a major five-volume book entitled Of. His critical and creative work has

dealt with many of the key issues in contemporary poetics: the role of orality, the influence of

projective verse and field poetics, the implications of haiku, tanka and zen on Imagist and

Objectivist poetics, the function of silence and breath in poetry, and the work of translation.

Yet staggeringly, even as people have attended to the poets that Corman introduced

and championed – Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Eigner, Enslin, Dorn – so Corman’s

name has slipped from people’s attention. Therefore, part scoping exercise, part analysis, this

article aims to re-centre the “core-man”, adumbrating his matrix of poetic connections, his

influence and the activities that shaped the development of American poetics in a myriad

directions over the past half a century. This article will focus on the three interlinked interests

that became the basis for Corman’s distinctive poetics. Firstly, it will investigate Corman’s

formative years in Boston and the establishment of his influential journal Origin; secondly, it

will consider Corman’s significant role as translator, as this work extended modernist

consciousness and reinforced his own poetic focus; and thirdly, it will explore his poetic

output, making the claim for seeing his major work Of as being on a par with other great

American long poems like Paterson, “A”, and The Maximus Poems. In this respect, the

article will re(in)state Corman’s importance as a mover-and-shaker within American poetics,

focusing to varying degrees on the three principal aspects of his activity – editor, translator

and poet.

Forging a Poetics and Editing Origin

Born in Boston in 1924, Corman graduated from Tufts University in 1945, and then

completed postgraduate work at the University of Michigan (where he won the prestigious

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Hopwood Award in poetry in 1947) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

before returning to Boston in 1948. Unimpressed with the poetic scene, he made efforts to

establish a “poetic community” by holding poetry events at public libraries. Corman writes in

the “Introduction” to his anthology The Gist of Origin: “Soon after my return I started a series

of poetry discussion groups in Boston, using the public libraries as base – utilizing evening

spaces (when the places were normally rather quiet). The groups were small but extremely

varied, and invariably educating for me at least” (Corman 1975, xvi).2 At venues that

included the West End Library (he also mentions groups in the suburbs of Cambridge and

Brookline in his letters to Charles Olson), Corman had three discussion groups going by May

1951, including among them the young writer Stephen Jonas, and one James Burgess, “the

author of several unpublished novels and the heart of my Dorchester poetry [discussion]

group, who died, prematurely” in about 1952 (see Evans, Vol. 1, 33 n.5). Corman describes

the location of his poetry reading groups within the West End as “the poorest part of Boston,

actually where my parents first met, the other side of where Robert Lowell lived. He never

went into that area, he always talks about the ‘other’ side, of Beacon Hill, but he never went

to the poor part. That’s what’s significantly missing in his work – is that sense of earth, the

real people” (Rowland, 4). It is clear that from the outset, Corman saw his activity as class-

based, challenging the more privileged and establishment perspective of the “Brahmin”

Lowell and those gathered around him.

Reinforcing this “alternative” poetic activity, Corman also established a network of

Boston-area friends connected to the modernist and experimental little magazine writing

scenes, such as Seymour Lawrence (editor of the magazine Wake), Richard Wirtz Emerson

(editor of the Golden Goose), and Pauline Hanson (poet and assistant to Elizabeth Ames, the

Director of Yaddo writers’ colony, where Corman first met Carlos Williams in a sojourn

arranged by Marianne Moore in July 1950). Corman thoroughly embedded himself in the

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poetic cultures of Boston: he attended academic lectures (such as T. S. Eliot’s Theodor

Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard in December 1950, later published as “Poetry and

Drama”, and William Carlos Williams’ reading at Harvard in May 1951); he read Charles

Olson’s “Maximus” poems at the Unitarian Church in Boylston Street, Boston in March

1951, and again at Gloucester in March 1953; he organized an exhibition of Olson’s poetry at

the Harvard Poetry Room in May 1951 and sought to organize a reading for Olson in Boston

under the auspices of Harvard University’s Morris Gary fund3; and he wrote an unpublished

play entitled “The Center”, directed by V. R. Lang in May 1951 at the Poet’s Theater in

Cambridge. In June 1953, he hitchhiked to Canada, where he established friendships with

Raymond Souster and the magazine Contact in Toronto, and the poet Irving Layton in

Montreal. He also befriended academics associated with Harvard University such as the

internationally-renowned scholars of Chinese Achilles Fang and Robert Hightower, both of

whom instilled in Corman an early interest in Asian cultures and language, something that

came to be a central plank in Corman’s writings. Other academic friends such as the

comparative literature professor Harry Levin (a former classmate of Olson’s in the late

1930s) and Edgar Lohner, an instructor in German at Harvard with whom Corman worked on

translating Gottfried Benn (later published in Origin 10, Summer 1953), laid the foundations

for Corman’s abiding interest in comparative literature and translation.

A significant further development during these post-war years of self-education was

Corman’s establishment in 1949 of a modern poetry radio programme on which poets read

live from their works, as well as the airing of tape-recordings. The foundation of the radio

programme was aided by his old friendship (dating back to their schooldays at Boston Latin

School) with Nat Henthoff (the now well-known jazz publicist, author and critic), who at the

time worked at the Boston radio station WMEX near Fenway Park as an announcer.4 A space

was cleared for the fifteen-minute poetry programme called “This is Poetry”, which ran for

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three uninterrupted years until 1951. Broadcasting readings from many poets in the Boston

area, the programme also included Richard Wilbur, Theodor Roethke, Stephen Spender, John

Crowe Ransom, Archibald MacLeish, John Ciardi, Allan Curnow, Richard Eberhart,

Marianne Moore, Katherine Hoskins, and Vincent Ferrini, as well as recordings of T. S. Eliot,

Charles Olson and James Joyce, and the promulgation of new, younger poets like Robert

Creeley. Some programmes were bilingual in English and French, Spanish, German or

Italian. As a result of this programme, Corman built up strong links with a wide range of

poets; and he also developed contact with other avid listeners like Larry Eigner and Ted

Enslin.

The key development during this period, however, was the establishment of arguably

the most influential journal dedicated to shaping the “new American poetry” in the mid-

twentieth century. After initial discussions with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson about the

financing and editorial nature of a new poetry journal, Origin was eventually published in

spring 1951. The rest is a cultural success story albeit not without some financial ups-and-

downs. Origin quickly became absolutely central in establishing and disseminating the key

practitioners of a more varied kind of modernism to a broader reading public. Without

repeating the history and development of Origin that is already so well documented (see

Golding, and Woods), suffice it to reassert here that throughout the late 1950s and the early

1960s, the first two series of Origin effectively opened up a new conceptual poetic field that

challenged the orthodoxies of the day. Paul Blackburn, writing of the state of little poetry

magazines in 1963, remarks upon the “solid ground” established by the First Series of Origin,

noting that “The concentration was upon poetry, though there were stories, letters, and once

in a while informal essays by various hands. There were occasional reviews over the five

years, but no policy of regular coverage. The poems themselves were the news, more often

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than not” (Blackburn, 11). Indeed, Olson praised Corman for effectively establishing a

Boston poetry renaissance:

that you have made Boston what it has not been for a very long time in literary &

cultural affairs: the hub it used to pride itself upon being! And though (between us) I

think you, as well as all of us New Englanders (the Creel [Robert Creeley], the Black

[Paul Blackburn] – who burns my arse, the Lynn Fish [Vincent Ferrini], and those I do

not know enough to call them names (Eigner [Larry Eigner], the Cape Cod lad

[Theodore Enslin], etc.) – that all of us are only parts of a Landsgeist which has now,

again, reasserted itself ... (Letter dated 24 September, 1953, Evans, Vol. 2, 91).

Corman’s fervent poetic activities in the Boston area certainly warranted such an accolade;

and whether or not Origin had consciously set out to realign the cultural formations of

American poetry and poetics, it is clear from Corman’s bold and decisive editorial policy, and

the voluminous correspondence with Olson while the First Series was being established and

produced, that the result was a singular intervention in initiating “the new American poetics”

in the 1950s. In typical overbearing manner when discussing editorial policy, Olson urged

Corman to be “OPEN” (the capitals indicate Olson’s insistence) so that Origin was “not a

champ clos (!) of taste alone” and “that any given issue of ORIGIN will have maximum force

as it is conceived by its editor as a FIELD OF FORCE” (Letter dated 3 May, 1951, Evans,

Vol. 1, 139). Corman was generally of like-mind and despite some early misgivings about the

impact of the magazine in changing the reading habits of people (Letter dated 7 May, 1951,

Evans, Vol. 1, 145), the resulting rigour of perception and openness to new writing talents

and poetic trajectories, enabled Corman to produce a magazine that effectively re-orientated

the direction of twentieth-century American poetics.

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All in all, during the 1950s and early 1960s, Corman busied himself with promoting,

disseminating, educating himself in, and constructing a poetic community and poetic practice

that he envisaged as the future of poetics. In the process, he developed three key areas that

suffused much of his future literary engagement: 1) a deeply ingrained conviction of poetry’s

democratic and public value, its community and connected relationships; 2) an abiding

commitment to widening cultural horizons by engaging with poetries from other languages;

and 3) the necessity of finding new poetic trajectories that challenged what he perceived to be

the tired, worn-out and unimaginative aesthetic tendencies that dominated American poetry.

Corman the Translator

Tied into much of this work as an editor, was Corman’s assiduous industry as a translator. As

his long-time Kyoto friend Gregory Dunne notes, Corman’s translation work began while he

was a university student and the translation work became “central to Cid’s development as a

poet and his accomplishment in poetry. He began translating very early and continued

translating throughout his life. He has probably translated from more languages and from a

wider time period than any poet, living or dead. This active engagement with translation over

such a long period of time has fed into his writing, broadening and deepening his sense of

what poetry is and what poetry can be” (Dunne 2006, 17). As with all translators, the work of

translators of poetry is often “hidden” behind that of the well-known originating authors; yet

their impact can be considerable in bringing innovative poetic techniques and forms to the

attention of monolingual writing communities. Instrumental as Corman was in forging a

distinctively new field in American poetics, he was not averse to turning to European models

for philosophical and poetic reinforcements, and nor was he shy of incorporating a more

extended cosmopolitan perspective by looking to Japanese and other Asian poetics. In this

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respect, Corman’s translation work significantly developed, extended and reinforced

awareness and consciousness of what constituted the wider field of international modernist

experimentation within the English-speaking consciousness.

One can see how such an intricate and overlapping matrix of influences emerged by

following Corman’s engagement with translating European poets. He began by producing the

first continuous translations of the German poet Paul Celan’s work, a poet closely associated

with “otherness” as a fundamental reality of existence. Celan in turn was a significant

influence on André Du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy and the

associated poet, Francis Ponge, a group of French poets who were known as the Éphémère

poets after the eponymous review that they started in 1966.5 The 1970s saw Corman’s

translations of Ponge’s Things (1971), Char’s Leaves of Hypnos (1973) and Jaccottet’s

Breathings (1974), and finally a selection of Du Bouchet’s poems (Origin, Fourth Series, No

3, April 1978) with an accompanying short Preface (1979). Shifting their focus from the

pyrotechnic flamboyance of surrealist fireworks, these French poets sought to revive the

sensible world through their renewed stress on observing things and objects in the world.

They fused a Mallarméan preoccupation with the limits of language with the interruptive and

anti-rational poetics of the surrealists, and blended this with the philosophical concerns of

language, ontology and alterity derived from Heidegger, Bataille and Blanchot (whose book

The Instant of my Death Corman translated in 2002).6 Arguably Corman was attracted to

these French poets’ philosophical preoccupation with Being, to their anti-conceptual thinking,

to their practice and understanding of poetry as a transgressive act that constantly struggles

against the illusions one takes for reality (Yves Bonnefoy), and to their conviction that

conceptual thought has severed humans from a sense of immediacy and masked our presence

to others in the world. In his Preface to Du Bouchet’s poems, Corman characterizes his

language as “irreducibly immediate. It can seem – so naked is it of the usual appeals to either

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form or content – so deliberately lacking in allusion or established myth – to have

disintegrated or to be disintegrating before our eyes and mind into pure event/occurrence”

(Corman 1979, 11-13).

Corman’s stress on shedding the ornaments of poetic garb in order to lay things bare

echoes Francis Ponge’s repeated insistence on the need to revalorize poetic language in order

to attain a more perfect adequation between words and things. Writing about Ponge’s

treatment of words as material things in the preface to his translation of Ponge’s Things,

Corman observes that Ponge

elicits from and perceives in the mute world an elaborate and exfoliating expression

of relation. ... the poetic task [is] an extension of language as an act of relation (words

themselves become things – substantive beyond grammatical analysis) ...

He not only hears/sounds/sees the words that occur to him, he renews the

pledge of meaning in them, honors it, through his allegiance to them and to the things

they are the voicings of. The silence he meets sings. An unashamed shaman music –

whose sense is lost in its event – in the integrity of a universe that merely includes us,

of which we are a slowly realizing particular.

He is, then, in the true sense of the word, a healer – his pharmacopeia: things

as they come clear of/through utterance, related, entered, joined, proliferating

(Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 27-8).

Corman focuses upon the relationship of words to things, on the texture of words, on the way

in which investigating things becomes also an investigation of the self, and on things as

summoned rather than named, issues that are central characteristics of his own poetry. Ponge

wrote that “The relationship between man and object is not at all limited to possession or use.

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No, that would be too simple. It’s much worse. Objects are outside the soul, of course; and

yet, they are also ballast in our heads. The relationship is thus in the accusative” (Ponge, 47).

Like Corman, rejecting any anthropomorphic projections of a writer’s feelings onto the world

in words, Ponge contends that a non-utilitarian use of language presents opportunities for the

reader to engage with new ways of experiencing the meaning, and that in so doing, the

subject’s relationship to language and to the world is reorientated as an ethical relationship.

In his study of non-narrative and non-referential experimental practices, Gerald L. Bruns

specifically points to Ponge’s distinction as a mode of ethical poetics: “‘accusative’, not

‘nominative’ – not a relationship of naming but one of being summoned, as if the poet were

someone who is porous with respect to things, suffering them or enjoying them but also, in

some way, addressed or obsessed (in the etymological sense of being besieged) by them”

(Bruns 2005, 82). The poetics of Bruns and Ponge – and, as we shall see, Corman – are

deeply indebted to a Levinasian understanding of the subject and its non-predatory

responsibility to and for the Other, “an ethical relation of proximity that reverses subjectivity

away from cognition and toward contact with things themselves” (Bruns 2001, 199). Corman

writes of Du Bouchet, “This is not poetry about – but a poetry of” (Corman 1979, 11), that

last word, as we shall see, reverberating throughout Corman’s oeuvre.

This matrix of philosophical, material and ethical interests feeds directly into

Corman’s own tight, frugal poetic lines that favour a propositional transparency and a pared-

down style that show an acute consciousness of what separates the poet from the world. Yet

Corman’s translations (appearing in both Origin and also in individual book form) also

develop and reinforce a strong bridge between the experimental poetics of the American

Objectivists and the Projectivists, and similar poetic preoccupations within those continental

writers’ work. This is a position reiterated by the generation of French poets that follow the

Éphémère poets, who openly declare their affiliation to the American Objectivists.7

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Arguably an even more significant impact was felt by Corman’s translation of various

Japanese poets, whose tight haiku and imagistic techniques clearly influenced and shaped

much of Corman’s own poetics, which in turn fed into his on-going dialogues about the

poetic concentration of particularities, words and language with people like Zukofsky,

Niedecker and Samperi. This translation work encompassed widely-praised translations of

Basho, Kusano Shimpei’s “frog poems” and Santoka’s haiku; and this work continued right

up to the end of his life, since Corman viewed the activity of translation as essential to getting

closer to the techniques of poetic practice (Dunne 2000b, 25). Corman’s early Black

Mountain-influenced poetic formulations were clearly reinforced and refined by his cultural

experiences gained in Japan in the 1960s. Favouring a short, pithy form in his own poetry,

Corman’s work is clearly influenced by the Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka, as well

as the work of the poet masters like Basho and Tu Fu, not to mention the wider Zen context

that is notable for its emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, spontaneous

action, and a letting go of self-conscious, judgmental thinking. This Zen context was strongly

reinforced by his friendship with Gary Snyder who spent time in Kyoto in the mid-1950s

training as a Buddhist.8 Zen practice emphasizes dharma practice and experiential wisdom –

particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen – in the attainment of

awakening. As such, Zen de-emphasizes both theoretical knowledge and the study of

religious texts in favour of direct individual experience of intuition. A back-cover statement

to the volume Nothing Doing observes:

Corman’s verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation

of “effect” for the tactile ink of line and “touch”. Nothing Doing presents a vital

poetry of Zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising

wisdom …

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“Nobody knows how to do so much with so few words as Corman. And

Nothing Doing is rich with his austerities, poems full of wisdom and tenderness and

absurdities.” – Robert Kelly (Corman 1999, back cover).

To Zen Buddhists, the place, the time and the event of one’s own true nature manifests itself

in the “koan”, often appearing to be paradoxical or linguistically meaningless dialogues or

questions. “Koans” are stories or dialogues that generally contain aspects that are inaccessible

to rational understanding, yet may be accessible where truth reveals itself unobstructed by the

oppositions and differentiations of language. Answering a “koan” requires a student to

relinquish conceptual thinking and the logical ways in which we order the world, so that like

creativity in art, the appropriate insight and response arises naturally and spontaneously in

mind. In his introduction to his translation of Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns: Basho’s

Oku-no-hosomichi (1968), Corman describes Basho’s work:

Most of his poetry (and it is within the tradition which he himself was shaping)

evokes a context and wants one. The poems are not isolated instances of lyricism, but

cries of their occasions, of some one intently passing through a world, often arrested

by the momentary nature of things within an unfathomable “order”.

If, at times, the poems seem slight, remember that mere profusion, words piled

up “about” event, often gives an illusion of importance and scale belied by the modest

proportions of human destiny. Precise conjunction of language and feeling,

appropriately sounded, directness and fulness in brevity, residual aptness and

alertness, mark haiku at best (as those in Basho): grounded in season and particularity,

no matter how allusive. “Down-to-earth and firm-grained” (Corman 1977, 22-3).

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In terms that echo his interests in the French poets, this description of Basho almost amounts

to a distillation of Corman’s own poetic manifesto – to the careful lineation, to the struggles

with the subtleties of words, to the brevity and compactness of the verses, to the desire to

produce a poetry grounded in particularities, to the exacting exploration of meaning

simultaneously nothing and something, and how this in turn, is involved in opening up the

relationship between silence and saying.9

The Poetic Oeuvre: Writing Of

In the world of poetry, much goes unacknowledged but much is owed to the momentum and

focus of first-class, editors and translators. Cid Corman was one such editor and translator.

Widely connected and thoroughly read, if his work stopped here, it would be immense,

powerful and hugely influential within the trajectory of American poetics over the past fifty

years. Unsurprisingly, his editorial and translation work contained idiosyncrasies, sometimes

contradictions, and occasional weaknesses of judgement, but it was always directed at

seeking out quality in poetry (no matter who the author), as well as the new and vibrant

voices in poetry, which he more often than not achieved. It is no exaggeration to say that as

an editor and translator, Corman introduced, shaped and developed the poetic trajectories of a

large number of key American poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet his

influence does not stop there. A much overlooked area of Corman’s work is his own poetry.

It should not be forgotten that Corman was a hugely prolific poet and essayist; and he wrote

to Olson in 1951 saying that he regarded his own writing with a great deal of seriousness

(Evans, Vol. 1, 72). He published well over one hundred and fifty volumes of poetry and

essays during his lifetime, the most significant being Sun Rock Man (New Directions, 1962),

Words For Each Other (Rapp & Carroll, 1967), Livingdying (New Directions 1970), Word

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for Word: Essays on the Arts of Language, Vol. 1 (Black Sparrow Press, 1977), At Their

Word: Essays on the Arts of Language, Vol. 2 (Black Sparrow Press, 1978), Aegis: Selected

Poems 1970-1980 (Station Hill, 1983), Root Song (Potes and Poets, 1986), And the Word

(Coffee House Press, 1987), Nothing Doing (New Directions, 1999), and a projected trilogy

of books (Dunne 2000b, 25) in The Despairs (Cedar Hill, 2001) and The Exaltations

(Mountains and Rivers Press, 2005) (the third volume, The Silences, appears not to have been

published).10 Furthermore, as a dedicated essayist, he wrote influential essays on Japanese

Noh theatre, Louis Zukofsky’s poetry, published a wide variety of thoughts on oral poetry

and performance, wrote essays on drama and translation, and wrote critical analyses about a

wide variety of poets’ work.

All this poetic activity culminated in the publication of his 5-volume magnum opus

entitled Of (Vols. 1 and 2, Lapis Press, 1990; Vol. 3, Origin Press, 1998, with volumes 4 and

5 still in manuscript), with intriguing jacket art based on Japanese letters by his friend the

American painter Sam Francis. A significant contribution to the American long poem by any

standards, Of has received little attention by reviewers and virtually no critical attention to

date. Taking seven years to write and arrange, each of the five volumes contains seven

hundred and fifty poems organized into five sections. The first sections of every volume are

(un-identified) translations or “other people’s words” (Dunne 2000b, 27); the second sections

are all about “other” people or legends, “my responses to other people’s lives and works,

sometimes fictional lives” (Dunne 2000b, 27); the third sections are first-person “I poems or

we poems, the first person kinds of things” (Dunne 2000b, 27); the fourth sections “involve

you, the other person” (Dunne 2000b, 27); and the fifth sections are poems about “everything,

it’s wide open, it’s impersonal but essential” (Dunne 2000b, 27). Describing his project in a

grand manner, Corman focuses upon community and cultural interdependence, claiming that

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it’s not one book, it’s not a Selected or Collected Poems, it’s a single book and there’s

nothing like it in the history of mankind – very simply. For me, it’s the new Bible:

literally, it’s to get rid of the old one and begin to put people together. That is, it deals

with all cultures all over the world, it tells my life (in passing); it relates to people

everywhere and it’s written in a way that even a child can enjoy. I write what I call

direct poetry: if you have to ask somebody to explain the poem then I’ve failed.

(Rowland, 1)

Elsewhere, Corman has stated that “It is not a selected or a collected book, as I’ve pointed out

to many people. The center piece is autobiography actually, all poetry, but about my life

before I began writing poetry. They all relate to my earliest life. ... My whole life is actually

in these books, but of course, not only my own life but all lives are encompassed in this book.

This is what makes it unique, the book. It includes all cultures and all times from the earliest

literature that we have, and even discussions of prehistory and so forth up to today as it is”

(Dunne 2000b, 25). It should be borne in mind though, that when Corman refers to his

autobiographical and life-writing elements, he qualifies this by saying that “not all ‘I’ poems

are me – not in an autobiographical sense, and my work is not at all confessional” (Rowland,

5). Corman makes a key distinction here, as he distances his poetic subject from more

orthodox poetic projections of the lyrical self that resonate in that word “confessional”,

especially with his stated misgivings about the poetics and politics of the “Confessional”

poets like Robert Lowell and his followers.

Whether or not the project is unique (one is reminded of the scope of his good friend

Zukofsky’s “A”, for example, not to mention his other friend Williams’ Paterson, and other

long poems like The Cantos and The Maximus Poems), the volumes are certainly a major

undertaking, often incorporating poems from his earlier publications, but now arranged in a

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loose narrative form, often in clusters of poems dealing with particular issues of themes. The

volumes present something of a retrospective organisation of Corman’s writing life,

conceived in the twilight of his life almost as a poetic autobiography. Yet the epigraph to the

first volume of Of positions this individual self first and foremost within a “socius”, an

openness to “otherness” as an a priori of existence: “the title reflects a precisely physical

metaphysics: the meta the indissoluble unfathomable fact: the genitive case: to which we are

all beholden and within which we remain hopelessly particular” (Of, Vol. 1, epigraph). This

phrase gestures towards Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “socius” that stresses the connectedness

of the elements in the field of culture, precluding any subject’s autonomy-from-others.

Indeed, we have seen that Corman repeatedly stresses community, inter-dependence and

connectedness as inextricable aspects of culture. Humans do not stand alone: they are simply

of. Wherever Corman looks, he sees being as crucially implicated in causal action on other

beings: the key is what happens between things rather than considering things as integral

entities.

This ethical relationship is reinforced by the use of Corman’s interesting term

“beholden”, which suggests deriving one’s subjectivity from elsewhere, self-coming-from-

somewhere-else, a being “of” something else. Corman makes no attempt to provide a

prophetic meta-discourse in his poetry to address the “what” of which we are a part or a

belonging, merely an acknowledgement of this almost Levinasian ethical state of things. As

we have seen in relation to Corman’s interest in translating the French “phenomenological”

poets, Levinas sits behind much of this “allotropic” poetry that points “in the direction of and

mov[es] out toward the Other” and grapples philosophically with the representational

complexity where “the mere act of figuration disfigur[es] the otherness he or she wishes to

represent”.11 Writing about Samuel Beckett’s conception of what constitutes “reality”,

Corman asserts that “One is never out of – just as one is always and eternally part of and

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interpenetrable, wholly, egregiously, penetrable. ... an individual will exacerbate his plight by

seeing only himself, by recognizing no other. More apt would be to realize oneself ONLY as

‘other’. For self is realized instinctively via open relation” (Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 111). In a

further essay on William Bronk’s poetry entitled “The Genitive Case”, Corman explores the

issue of the “self” and consciousness. In a language that derives more from the terms of

Bronk’s poetics than French philosophy, Corman nevertheless asserts an ethical openness to

subjectivity in a manner that is clearly indebted to French phenomenological thought12:

“What we must do is not ‘revealed’ to us except through what we feel we are capable of and

feel desirable and driven to do – which does, to some extent, if not entirely, come to us from

beyond ourselves, but interactingly, and multi-dimensionally. ... The largest commitment we

know and are given to and must meet is the genitive case. We are OF. This is our

predicament, our plight, our allegiance. We need not admit it; it doesn’t matter a damn; we

are OF – beyond choice, beyond faith. We are dedicate as we are” (Corman 1977, Vol. 1,

117-18). This Levinasian framework clearly places Corman’s poetry within a

phenomenological context that derives its influences from Heidegger and French

phenomenology, displaying clear deconstructionist characteristics in its perception of

language.

Yet in the face of this irreducible stance towards this “other”, Corman’s poetics is a

clear rejection of “knowing the ineffable”, which is repeatedly shown to be a futile quest.

Poems revel in the everyday, the particular, finding the significances of life not in the

metaphysical, but in the ordinariness of human actions. Like William Carlos Williams’ “This

is just to say”, Corman sees that “the obvious / baffles” (Of, Vol. 2, 548), and demands that

we look more closely at the everyday human mind, activities, bodies, relations for knowledge

and understanding:

17

What are words

if not engagements

in meaning? Life means.

Even as death does.

All you have to do

is know – anything.

And who can stop you?

God only begins. (Of, Vol. 2, 560)

“Meaning” (another resonant word in Corman’s writing), such as it exists, is not abstract or

absolute, but negotiated in the encounter of looking at particulars. God is not an end to a

process of making meaning, but a start. Religious belief merely masks the reality and endows

life with a temporary “manageability”. In a frequently dismissive and facetious rejection of

Christianity and the role of God as providing answers to humanity’s lack of understanding,

Corman places the thrust of his ontological exploration in language, although not without an

ironic twist to words as the ultimate bearers of knowledge:

The search for

meaning is

the search for

life. You have

only to

18

find the word. (Of, Vol. 2, 570)

The irony lies in that word “only”, since a simple style belies the difficult labour of working

at the “finding”. Words never open up some transcendent realm that permits the poet to

correspond directly with a spiritual world. Rather, words are engaged in a repeated process of

simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction, of simultaneously embedding a figurative

and opaque quality, of gesturing and hiding at the same time. In his characteristic syllabic

metric structure that seeks to make all the words and phrases in the poem work, Corman

ambiguously posits a finding of “the word” as the answer to “meaning”, or finding and

comprehending the word “life” as the answer to meaning. Wrapped up in this complexity is

Corman’s conviction that metaphysical questions about the “logos” and the “end” of meaning

can only result in self-reflexive linguistic definition:

At the end

You ask: Is

that all? No –

implicit

answer comes –

this is all. (Of, Vol. 2, 605)

There is an exacting ambiguity here, where “this” is the poem as well. Answering the

question “Is that all?” seems to be met by silence, or by the poem, or by language itself. As a

positive answer, “this” equally gestures to the poem itself – writing, language, signs – as an

indication of what exists ontologically in the face of nothingness. Thus, language becomes

19

performative or perlocutionary, a gesturing without grasping, “this”, a self-referential gesture

of pointing to itself. Furthermore, it demonstrates Corman’s relentless preoccupation with

whatever epistemological power to know the world poetry possesses. Addressing himself to

the question of whether his poetry is a celebration of nothingness, Corman responds:

Yes, that’s exactly what it is doing, celebrating nothingness. But this is nearer some

Japanese Zen thinking, of course, and some Indian thinking too, that nothingness is

not a negative. And I use the word over and over again in my poems playing on the

fact that the word is ambiguous in the English. Where as soon as we start using it

then, we find ourselves caught up in ambiguities. And for me, it is not a negative. It’s

a positive. Every poet, every writer faces the blank page. This is where we start. Start.

But is where we return to also. And it is important. And the weakness of most poets

today and always is that they don’t face it. There is no meaning to the word life unless

there is death. We must understand that. We must face it, and honestly. But as I’ve

said over and over again, I’ve never met an honest person in my life, and I never

expect too [sic]. All we can do, at best, is try to be honest. It’s really impossible to be

honest. The nearest we come often is by lying (Dunne 2000b, 28).

“Honesty” here is the struggle, the endeavour, to deal with reality. People are not “honest”

because they cannot face up to death, absence, and nothingness – and all words can do is

make repeated vague stabs at representing this elusive reality. Despite his engagement with

words, Corman rejects any suggestion that language can offer a clear definition and

explanation of life, seeing such a suggestion as predicated on a false understanding of

language and its relation to the world. In a self-confirming, circular logic, questions about

20

meaning always refer us back to words, reference to the particularity of existence, the

“objectness” of life:

Is this

a poem?

Like asking

you if

you are

you. Are you? (Of, Vol. 2, 524);

or again in another example:

If poetry has

any meaning it

has to be this – it

has to be yours and

you its. Every

word finally fits. (Of, Vol. 2, 532)

Like Robert Creeley’s verse, Corman’s poetry is usually understated, compact and

unostentatious. “Short poems on large subjects: Wonder, Contentment”, observed his deeply

valued friend, Lorine Niedecker (Niedecker webpage). Along with many of the Black

21

Mountain poets, Corman had an abiding interest in poetic form, albeit not an abstract form

imposed upon the words, but rather a form that grows organically out of the relationship of

the language to the ear, or the breath, of speaking: “Poetry takes form out of the living

substance of speech, the breath shapes” (Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 64). When describing William

Carlos Williams’ work, Corman states that it is “a language less pinned to the page, a

language that picks up from speech” (Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 70). Corman’s two-volume Word

for Word collection of essays, contain a sustained and carefully considered series of

arguments on the value, process and necessity of “oral poetry” and the “orality of poetics”. At

times, the thinking appears naïve; but many ideas appear to us now as well established

practices (especially if one considers the work of a host of poets like David Antin, Jerome

Rothenberg, cris cheek, etc). Much of this thought about poetry’s relation to voice appears to

have been partly worked out in relation to Olson’s formulations of “Projective Verse” (as can

be seen in the Olson & Corman Correspondence), but they are not slavish in their imitation

of Olson’s statements. On the contrary, much of the formulation is clearly the result of

recording experiments undertaken by Corman in Paris in the late 1950s and subsequently, in

which he has worked on the way in which the voice’s articulation shapes poetry.13 Corman’s

work stresses the cognitive dimensions of language that exceed those of semantics, and he

clearly arrived at formulations that proleptically key into recent debates about the

performative and oral dimensions of poetry. For example, Peter Middleton’s essay “Poetry’s

Oral Stage” argues that sound “provides a resource for poets to extend the semantic range of

their poems” and following Heidegger, urges that an important dimension of being in the

world is sound itself, which “calls for an attention that is too often neglected in a culture that

over-emphasises vision” (Middleton, 58).

Consequently, Corman’s poetry demonstrates a deep humility – often the poems are

about humanity’s weakness of understanding, in the face of the facile power that humans

22

arrogate and assume. Echoing Olson’s refusal of the predatory instinct in poetry, although

shunning the emergence of Olson’s dominating ego, Corman’s poetics is more one of a

Levinasian self-erasure and self-abnegation. Indeed, one of the frequent preoccupations

evident in Of and much of Corman’s poetry, is the relationship of life and death, and the

meaning of these two states. In a highly existential manner, Corman sees both states as

intricately entwined with one another, and in order to express this fundamental

interrelationship, Corman invents the term “livingdying” (one word) to describe life/death. In

fact, one of his more prominent collections is entitled Livingdying, and gives for an epigraph:

“Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben” (“Life is death, and death is also a life”, a

quotation from Holderlin’s poem “In beautiful blue...”). The poems in the collection embrace

all aspects of life, and this experiential variety defines living-as-a-dying, or a living-towards-

dying. Since Corman’s is a poetics of a process of the realisation of experience, it is not

surprising that his poetry should seek to explore different states of consciousness – the

differences between recognition, understanding, realisation, imagining, and knowing.

Recognising that the terms of reality are constantly changing, many poems plot this changing

consciousness, since poems are regarded as possibilities, breaking or pushing at habits and

limits. One is reminded of Robert Creeley’s repeated observations that painting can teach

poetry about the processes of coming-to-realisation: “Again painters are relevant insofar as

painters will tell you momently that to paint what you know, as Kline would say, is a bore to

oneself. To paint what someone else knows is a bore to them, so one paints what one doesn’t

know. And the point of that is, the painting becomes a process of realization” (Creeley, 163).

In the light of this observation, one ought not to forget that any concentration that we may

give to Corman’s theories and ideas about the oral dimension of poetry, are to the exclusion

of his extensive considerations of and writing about the other senses – sight and sound are

extensively discussed (see Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 83-7) and his poem Of frequently deals with

23

ekphrasis and the relationship between the mediums of painting and words as visual objects.

This interest in turn echoes the similar engagement that resulted in the art criticism published

by the French Éphémère poets on painters such as Alberto Giacometti, Nicolas Poussin,

Pierre Tal-Coat, Hercules Seghers, Joan Miro, Antoni Tàpies and Goya.

There can be no doubt that Corman was influenced by Olson’s open field poetics,

with its resistance to the inherited line, stanza and form, with its stress on the act of an instant

and staying faithful to the track of perception, with its concept of the poetic line as an

enactment of ideas and with its transference of energy from the poet, through the poem, to the

reader. Yet unlike the striding force of the mythico-historical poetic persona “I” in Olson’s

voice, Corman’s voice is the entrammelled, quiet voice of an “ordinary guy” confronting a

fluctuating reality, wrestling with the relationship between interpretation and consciousness

in an incremental body of work that demonstrates an existential exploration of the ego-

centred assumptions into which one habitually relaxes. Corman’s poems are acts of discovery

during which it becomes clear that the poet is uncertain but always seeking, confident in his

uncertainty rather than relying on previous certainties, interested in approaches to complexity

rather than momentary resolutions. Rather than seeking to abolish the gap or interval between

the world and self, Corman’s poems spark off this rift to exploit it. Combining the

Projectivist stress on words as enablers of action with the Objectivist attention to the poem as

an assemblage of particularities, Corman’s poetics put logic and ratiocination into question,

suspending the human will to order – indeed, shying away from the human-centred

imposition of control. Corman’s poetics shifts from a politics to an ethics. For Corman, the

poet is involved in an organizing activity in relation to the perceptual field without actually

carrying out the organisation. Reclaiming a fresh idiom of perception, Corman writes a

poetry that is a means of expression that is self-aware, where meaning and language twist

back into the speaking subject.

24

An excellent example of this linguistic self-reflexivity occurs in Of, Volume 3, section

iv, entitled “breath WORKS”, a sequence that explores this semantic ambiguity of breath

working, of being a source of “works”, and the sequence itself being a collection of “breath

works”. The sequence is a thorough working (over) of the word “breath”, exploring it in its

multifarious semantic properties as a concept, idea, action, metaphor, and process. The

sequence is also a meditation on the word and concept “breath”, with its semantic and

philosophical inter-linkings, echoes and resonances, dominated by a thematic of

indeterminacy. Breath emerges variously as an organic connection, a conduit for contact like

an umbilical cord with one’s mother (Of, Vol. 3, 463, 572), as a form of intuitive

understanding of others that exists beyond language (Of, Vol. 3, 464), a signification of

physical exertion (Of, Vol. 3, 466), a deep connection that links life with death (Of, Vol. 3,

470), a means to experiencing the vitality of existence and its potential (Of, Vol. 3, 472), a

sign of influence through language, or “inspiration” as a breathing of someone else’s breath

(Of, Vol. 3, 474, 581, 613), an indicator of the way in which meaning lingers and persists

after articulation (Of, Vol. 3, 480, 532), an indication of the intricate interconnection of

breathing as a sign of something (life) and nothing (death) (Of, Vol. 3, 484-5, 486, “yours the

breath death draws”, 528, and 584, 623), a sign of community, an entwinement of one with

another (Of, Vol. 3, 574, 622), a sign of the absence of meaning (Of, Vol. 3, 496, 498) and the

inherent value in every thing (495, 598), breathing indicating being caught in the very trap of

(non)meaning (Of, Vol. 3, 498, 610), with breath bringing one to the very brink of immersion

in the world, revealing a humility in front of that glory of existence (Of, Vol. 3, 499). The

sequence investigates how breath is bound up with a consciousness of the double-sidedness

of thingness and nothingness in existence (Of, Vol. 3, 500), with poems that seem to teeter on

the brink of a revelation and poems that desire an enunciation and use signs to approach a

significance but find only empty husks “as if emptiness / and silence were heard / for what

25

they both meant” (Of, Vol. 3, 529): “Discovering / the word. Which is? / Each is. The this. //

This the. Paring – / preparing the / breath – sucking seed” (Of, Vol. 3, 530). Each poem is

thought to be a forward articulation only to be a step back, like taking a breath to regain a

breath (Of, Vol. 3, 533). The physical actions and associations of breathing are inextricably

bound up with the linguistic phrases and subjective interpretation inextricably folds back into

shifting signifiers. Consider the following short poem:

As much as

this is this

is nothing

You take a

breath and you

are taken (Of, Vol. 3, 502)

In the first stanza, pivoting on the second “this”, semantics jars with lineation, producing a

shifting syntax that either reads “as much as this is / this is nothing”, or “as much as / this is

this / this is nothing”. The effect is that the first stanza reminds one of the fact that whatever

the poem is, it is something and nothing, simultaneously. In the second stanza, the second

person “you” takes the breath and through this action one is captured (“taken”). The action of

breathing almost involuntarily causes you to be passive and “beholden” (to echo the earlier

discussion). The sequence constantly shows awareness of the fragility and inexplicability of

an understanding that lies just beyond language (Of, Vol. 3, 507). Concentrating on breathing,

on breath, is a focus on the qualities of living and dying, a concentration that slows things

down (Of, Vol. 3, 522), reminding one of being alive (Of, Vol. 3, 526). Looking for meaning

26

in words always runs the risk of finding nothing (Of, Vol. 3, 524, 550): “Death is nothing – /

dying is all // Catch breath if you /can and be caught” (Of, Vol. 3, 541). Breathing is tied up

with making meaning and preserving a sense of life and death (Of, Vol. 3, 559), but breath is

only an indication of living-towards-death, as each breath marks another second closer to

death: “Every breath is / one breath less – gone gone / but going” (Of, Vol. 3, 494).

As his detailed analysis of this “breath sequence” demonstrates, Corman shows

writing to be a means of knowing one’s own finiteness, of sizing up the tricks of language,

and of learning how to distinguish between the possible and impossible. Far from seeking a

plenitude, Corman’s poems value deficiency and incompleteness, where writing is an

experience of unbinding, of uncertainty and of ambiguity. Events and particulars are related

by dint of their proximity or paratactic juxtaposition and meaning derives from their

particularization. The poet interferes little or not at all to make overt connections: the

juxtaposed units establish relations among themselves. The poetic method is ethical in that it

accepts and respects the affective power of the universe in its diversity rather than coercing

that diversity into unifying concepts. Poets are not “creators” of the world, but its creatures,

“beholden” to the world. Poems enact the realization that the world is not disordered

requiring human “rectification”, but rather that a latent order is present in the material world.

Maintaining a precarious ethics in action, Corman’s poetics is a process whereby perceptual

intake and imaginative response occur before conceptualisation.

With all this insistence on “the ethics of breath”, the performative speaking and

sounding of words, it might come as something of a surprise then to read Lorine Niedecker

extolling “Corman [a]s the poet of quiet” (Niedecker webpage). This characterizes Corman’s

subtle, undemonstrative poetics; and in his frequent poetic meditations on silence, saying,

language and communication, there is an explicit exploration of how words struggle to

articulate significance in the face of meaninglessness, ignorance and stupidity, and many

27

poems are a record of this struggle. Two poems from his volume Nothing Doing exemplify

this:

Ask Theseus

Is this what I mean?

Is this what means me?

Am I what this means?

Meaning loses us.

We are lost within

Whatever we find;

or again:

Stop now and

Consider

What it means

Not to mean

Anything.

Begin to

28

Understand (Corman 1999, 31).

Through a frequent and not untypical Corman process of linguistic chiasmus, in the first

poem, he cannily questions the nature of subjectivity, interpretation, and whether the self has

agency over meaning, or whether language “speaks us” in some curious echo of the

structuralist argument. Corman asserts that “The chemistry of language cannot be reduced to

formulae” and that language does not work like a scientific laboratory, offering up meaning

as a solution to an experimental problem: “We trust analysis to reveal a meaning to us and

fail to realize that that reductive approach prevents faith and sense of meaning IN EVENT,

AS FEELING.… Poetry, as long as it is poetry, must be the vehicle, the transparent medium,

whereby the individual finds himself revealed at home in the unknown, with ‘each other’ and

with ‘all’” (Corman 1977, Vol. 1, 20-1). Corman’s poetry repeatedly demonstrates a stylistic

vacillation between declaration and dissimulation; propositional statements are

simultaneously asserted and placed radically into question. The poems suggest that there is no

metaphysical “answer” and that meaning is much more of a pragmatic, provisional and

unstable process. The fragility of language is a stab at meaning that constantly eludes one.

“Meaning”, “means”, “to mean” – as we have seen, these are words that resonate throughout

Of and are prominent in the lexis of Corman’s poems more widely, as they repeatedly

examine the extent to which meaning exists in objects, or arises from the predatory

interpretative practices of subjects:

Why must you have a meaning? That is where you turn away from honesty again.

This is precisely it. The idea of meaning runs through all my recent work. What’s the

meaning? Why must it have a meaning? What is the importance of meaning? It is

almost as though we need a focus for life, and meaning provides a focus. In fact, most

29

people do whatever they do in order not to have to think about it. That is what is

actually going on. We call it reality or actuality, but these words have no meaning

whatsoever. It is very hard to say these things because even our language hides it from

us. The very language is created to elude us in a way. So that almost every poem has

to be a lie in order to get near the truth of being, of what we call being (Dunne 2000b,

28).

Language here seems to be an inducement to blindness rather than insight, since as Corman

writes elsewhere in Of, “We have evolved a language to command our ignorance” (Of, Vol.

2, 238). Corman’s silences and typographical gaps are not those induced by some traumatic

rupture and subsequent repression. Reminiscent of the hermeneutics of suspicion surrounding

the nature of metaphor and language more generally that is embedded in so much

deconstructive thought, Corman’s silences indicate gaps in our knowledge, gaps that should

be sustained and represented rather than metaphysically bridged. For a poetics of realisation,

this is a crucial ethic in Corman’s use of language. It is in this respect that Corman’s poetics

are a poetics of silence – a silence that demonstrates a responsibility to our lack of

understanding, or “cognitive conundrums”. The silence testifies to language’s inability to

signify a totality, an entirety, of knowledge, where actuality exceeds representability and

“truth” is not iterable as a fixed conclusion:

Every

word resists

the meaning

it pretends (Of, Vol. 2, 604).

30

In Corman’s typical deployment of the etymological dimension in his poetry, words here

emerge as signifiers that inherently embed contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes: they

“with stand” or “stand firm” against the meaning that they “profess”, “put forward” or “put in

play”. In other words, signs play against themselves, undermine themselves, destabilize

themselves. One can hear the precise echo of a deconstructive notion of signification, a

characteristic that is more thoroughly exploited in the poetics of the “Lang Gang”, as Corman

describes them. This silenced, unpresentable element in language is not (and cannot be)

subsumed. Such a position leads to the postmodern art that seeks to find new idioms for its

expression – to quote Jean-François Lyotard’s famous definition, “[putting] forward the

unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard, 81). This silence disrupts the laws and

conventions of discourse. Like the sublime, it is reason or language being overwhelmed by

events too great to fully comprehend, signifying the limits of the imagination:

Silence often’s

less inarticulate

than the arti-

fices of words. (Of, Vol. 1, 284).

In this exploration of representation and non-representation, silence and articulation, it should

come as no surprise that many of Corman’s poems echo the language of the French

poststructuralists; and the lexicon of absence, trace, silence and presence is particularly

marked in some poems (see, for example, Of, Vol. 1, 290). Nevertheless, in this context, it

should not be forgotten that one of the lines of enquiry for Heidegger and Derrida in their

31

attempt to challenge the rationality of logocentric discourses was the non-Western modes of

thinking in Zen Buddhism.14

Conclusion

Never one to push himself forwards, Corman’s own work has inadvertently become the

victim of his unswerving dedication to ensuring the dissemination of the work of other poets.

This article can only be a preface to the extended investigation of Corman’s deeply ethical

poetics. By asserting the primary significance of looking over the logic of understanding,

Corman weds himself to ethical distinctions and phenomenological enquiries that are never

sacrificed to an expression of a vision of history or mythology as occurs in The Maximus

Poems or Pound’s Cantos. Corman’s enormous body of work, as yet largely unexplored,

requires substantial detailed attention and this would undoubtedly repay dividends on a wide

range of issues that are currently of pressing concern to contemporary poetics, such as his

contribution to the development of the American long poem, his arguments about the

relationship of poetry to interpretative processes and the democracy of writing, and the

connection of poetry to issues of performance, to name but a few areas. With his persistent

blurring of the core and margin of American poetics, both in his “ex-centric” position in

Japan and through his persistent reaching for appropriations and decentrings to keep poetry

fresh and new, Corman’s poetic work exemplifies Joseph N. Riddel’s deconstructive

understanding of the way in which American poetry makes itself anew (see Riddel).

Consequently, the thrust of this article has sought to establish the importance of investigating

Corman’s key roles as poet, editor and translator, as we try to understand the significance of

the sea-change in American poetics that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.

32

Notes

33

1 . Corman spent a brief spell in Boston during the 1970s, when he and his wife tried to run

several unsuccessful businesses.

2 . Corman’s introductory essay to this compilation is an excellent source for much of the factual

information concerning the establishment of Origin, but also for information concerning

Corman’s early career. See also Rowland for information concerning the establishment, running

and nature of the participants in the poetry discussion groups.

3 . By the time Olson’s reading actually occurred at the Charles Street Meeting House in Boston

on 11 Sept. 1954, Corman had already left for Europe on his Fulbright Scholarship to the

Sorbonne in Paris. The Morris Gary reading didn’t occur until 1962. Much of this information

concerning Corman’s activities and friendships can be gleaned from both volumes of Evans.

4 . Radio WMEX is a now defunct radio station. Around 1950, a well known Boston

philanthropist Ralph Lowell founded a project called the Lowell Institute Cooperative

Broadcasting Council, in which half a dozen or so commercial radio stations in Boston each

donated a couple of hours broadcasting time each week on their stations to present educational

programmes in cooperation with Harvard, MIT, Boston University and other higher education

institutions. The Lowell Institute had a small staff which guided the concept and provided

recording facilities and manpower to present programming. Sometimes, lectures were recorded

at the various participating colleges or other locations. Arnie Ginsburg, a onetime recording

engineer involved with this concept during the start-up period and subsequently a radio

presenter of considerable acclaim, has suggested to me in private correspondence that “This is

Poetry” must have been part of the Lowell Institute programming. As the educational

broadcasting idea grew, the Lowell Institute Broadcasting eventually built a non-profit

educational station WGBH-FM, which then built WGBH-TV. Both these outlets garnered great

support in Boston and achieved a prestigious reputation as one of the best educational

broadcasting groups in the USA. I am indebted to private correspondence with Arnie Ginsburg

and Fred McLennan for help with this information. See also the account in Corman 1952, where

he has claimed that it was the “first” modern poetry radio programme, although other

programmes clearly preceded it elsewhere in the USA (see Spaulding).

5 . For an account of Celan’s influence on these poets, see Joris, in which he notes that Paul

Celan’s Meridian opened the first issue of l’Ephémère.

6 . There is a substantial English-language body of critical investigation into the Heideggerian

orientation of the Ephémère poets. See, for example, Wagstaff, Higgins, Cady and Petterson.

7 . Poets like Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journaud and Jean-Marie Gleizes, and Anne-

Marie Albiach, many of whom corresponded with Corman and had poems published in Origin,

acknowledged the Objectivist influence. See Wall-Romana.

8 . For a description of this coterie that included such scholars of Japanese Zen thought as Burton

Watson and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, see Yampolsky, and Watson. See also Norton for a discussion

of the impact and utilisation of Zen concepts in Snyder’s poetics, which have a great deal of

applicability to those of Corman as well.

9 . A further strong link in this matrix of influence is Jaccottet’s well established indebtedness to

Japanese haiku. For example, one might consider Stout, and Cady, 65 & ff, in which she draws

out the impact of the haiku on Jaccottet’s poems written in the early 1960s and collected in the

volume Airs (Poèmes 1961-1964) (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), but also points to both Du

Bouchet’s and Yves Bonnefoy’s interests in Japanese haiku.

10 . Gregory Dunne has done as much as anybody so far to champion the contribution by Corman

to American poetry. See Dunne 1996, and Dunne 2000a.

11 . See Stamelman for an incisive review of Philippe Met’s essay collection entitled André du

Bouchet et ses Autres.

12 . Corman was clearly well versed in such philosophy, having spent key years in Paris in the

1950s, translated a host of French poets including Francis Ponge’s Things, as well as Maurice

Blanchot’s The Instant of my Death (2002), and he possessed several texts on phenomenology

in his personal library, including Heidegger’s works and Sartre’s “What is Existentialism?”, the

latter signed and dated 1946 by Corman.

13 . For further information concerning these experiments, see also Rowland, 7-11.

14 . In an uncanny coincidence, Martin Heidegger showed particular interest in the work of the

Kyoto School of Zen philosophy, a sympathy that resulted from mutual philosophical affinities

such as their shared interest in the importance of ontology, especially the concept of

nothingness, and their shared antipathy towards modern technology. For further discussion of

the relationship between Heideggerian thought and Japanese influences, see May. Jacques

Derrida also developed interests in Far Eastern thought, much of which is carefully analysed in

Magliola.