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TRANSCRIPT
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.