Chicago Review Article

Abstract

There are many living poets who inspire my life, whose work I enjoy as a regularity in my living, but there are three, right now, who contribute directly to my filmmaking as powerfully as Pound, Stein, Olson, Creeley, Dorn when I was young (*) (as powerfully as ancients of the craft whose poems form a basis for my, and everyone else's, English-language being): these three today are Michael McClure, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Jarnot. McClure's aesthetic evolution has, since the friendship in our early twenties, always seemed consonant with mine--i.e., his words worn as if the sleeve of his physical being (much as I see my filmed images as extensions of my optic system, and then later my whole body as mentor to that system. Finally now the medium itself, the muse, as it were, becomes outlet for my nerve system's most hidden sparking innards). McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). He invents a form for these cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page; and he sticks with it across his life like a solid moving through an inferno. I too stick with the given window of film, the slightly variable rectangle of film's-frame; and I (however much I admire D. W. Griffith's varieties of frames) adhere to that beam of projector ligh t and its rectangle of eye's composed feed-back--this stage for sharing the anomalies of my visual privacy... (only exception, the Purgation sequence of The Dante Quartet, in cinemascope for its widening gyre of transformation, as Yeats would have it): and my display of visions (like Michael's enverbaled vision) come to the film window (the page?) directly from my physical self, the rhythms and tones of my biological response, my very breath and organic breadth of being. Few poets have managed to complete an epic poem in our Time: Pound's Cantos are left undone, trailing off in a ragged stitch of lines more emblematic of the social Times of their post-WW II writing then integrally related to the whole poem; Olson also leaves a lovely garland, as it were, of variants upon the themes of Maximus Dr. W. C. Williams also veering off Patterson into the variant greatness of Desert Music; H. D. coming-to-rest but not to a thematic conclusion of Helen In Egypt. The only completed epic poetics of the twentieth century I personally accept-as-such are those of Louis Zukofsky, his A, Gertrude Stein, her Stanzas in Meditation, possibly completed, although one wonders (in the light of Ulla Dydo's monumental research) if the terrible quarrel between Alice Toklas and Gertrude didn't shift the poem radically away from its pristine linguistic beginnings into the more narrative drama of their irresolvable argument. Finally, for me then, we have Ronald Johnson's ARK, miraculously finished a couple years before his death. This work, more than any epic (since Pound's Cantos inspired my film Dog Star Man), has directly engendered a reciprocal epic film, the Vancouver Island Trilogy: I stood at times waist deep in ocean reading the typewritten (unpublished at that time) continuance (past ARK 50) of the poem which Ronald was kind enough to send me. The full poem had been printed (with a verbal description of myself enoceaned) by the time 8 years later when I was photographing the third section of my film. Ronald and I are both from Kansas, as is Michael McClure (all three of us growing up within a hundred square miles of each other): from those grounds Ronald manages linguistic landscapes which finally encompass the Western world, its history coming down finally (as in a child's Vision) to the exactitudes of that geography and biology before, and being one with, the eyes and ears of the poet's language--an imaginary multiple series of recognitions of real toads (as Marianne Moore would have it) inhabiting the grain-growing (under inverted blue bowl of sky) flats of Kansas. …