Black Molehill
David Harsent
The Charm Robert Creeley (Calder and Boyars £1.50) Regarding Wave Gary Snyder (Fulcrum E2.00) The Lost Country Kathleen Raine (Dolmen £1.40) The Irrelevant Song Brian Patten (Allen and Unwin £1.75) After the Merrymaking Roger McGough (Cape £1.50) Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard Barry MacSweeney (Fulcrum £1.80)
Many of the policy statements surrounding the output of the Black Mountain poets are grandly prolix; eager readers ploughing through Olson's Projective Verse or Robert Duncan's Notes on Poetics could be excused, on turning to the poems, for wondering just where the outcome of all that theorising lay. To confuse matters further, the movement was pretty broadly based, taking in a number of the Beat poets; and Creeley has stated that he published poems , in Black Mountain Review which didn't quite toe the party line. The wider aims are quickly noted, though; Whitman, Pound and William Carlos Williams stood as mentors, and the common task was to meld form and content in a tone — almost a speaking voice — identifiably American. In a more negative sense, then, it was a deliberate movement away from such figures as Allen Tate and John CroweRansom: those of the Fugitive Group.
Williams was Creeley's single greatest influence; and his subject almost always human relationships in the restricted (but not necessarily restricting) sense. To the Imagism of Williams's early work, Creeley brought a worrisome obliquity which often seemed to cloak incidents or emotions in a largely spurious abstraction — tendentious, even self-perpetuating, it allowed the reader to walk around the poem but kept him from its centre.
In The Charm we are given Creeley's early and uncollected poems — including the first he remembers writing — though it scarcely rates as juvenilia. From a documentary point of view, the collection has its purpose; we can , detect, for instance, an incipient, not yet doggedly epigrammatic, winnowing of definitions together with an attempt to pin down the inner-ness of things:
It was never this or that they • Wanted, so given their sorrow, or was what they wanted yours and Would you have given them over • the flowers, the coolness, delinquent
but there are also troubling -indications, typified in these lines, that the attempt is
almost pleased to fail; and the innovations in form often appear as a means by which what is essentially slight might seem laden with portent. Nor is the spontaneity of the poems any great help in all this. Creeley — in common with others of the group — has stated that his poems take no longer to write than the time needed to type them, and that they usually go unrevised. Here, as elsewhere in his work, it shows.
Gary Snyder's affiliations with nature: with the seasons and with what he refers to as "the work of the tribe" appears to stem naturally enough from the Whitmanesque roots of Black Mountain and progress through the Beats' reverence for the great outdoors. It is also, of course, part and parcel of his deep interest in Zen. At his best, he lets the images of mountain, forest or snowscape through with little attached but a real sense of sympathy; the impedimenta of the poems appears as a list of love-objects. Too often, though, he gives the impression of being overly conscious of his role of awestricken innocent, in Nature's thrall, brought trembling to the brink of enlightenment by an induced unworldliness.
Regarding Wave promotes Snyder in just that role. There is the notion of the immament vision, the simple life, the sacrosanct, fructive images of nature extending to ascetic perception. But the shifts are too easily organised: " milliondarted rain," "lightning," "wind-bent bamboo" are all parts of an expected if insubstantial, preface to "the plank shutter/set/Half open on eternity;" and despite the fact that we accept the " back country " as Snyder's real territory, it's difficult to ignore the laboured transition from natural object to weighty implication, just as it's irritating to be constantly faced with the poet as child of nature. The pose, finally, is a self-regarding, self-promoting one, made obvious in the epigraph to the poem It: " Reading Blake in a cowshed during a typhoon on an island in the East China Sea," where the inscription seems to exist in order to enhance the poem in the same way that the poems often appear to do little more than promote the poet's lifestyle: "Friends and poets/Eating, drinking in the rain . . . " It's a cosy picture, even virtuous, but largely unpersuasive.
Kathleen Raine's country is less palpable than Snyder's, though she is no less committed to it: "The only Paradise, Proust said/Is the lost country that has passed/Out of time and into mind ..." Reading the poems, it's difficult at first to see exactly what has been lost; little enough has changed in Miss Raine's restricted formal range and resolutely archaic diction at any rate. Who else could offer us so many examples of a vocabulary long since fossilised: "Dancing shapes that come and go/Purified in that silver pool/ Elusive of enamoured sense . . . " To walk beside such crystal streams . . . . " Eliot with sober mein . . " There's only the occasional hint to suggest that English poetry has progressed at all since the Georgians.
Finally, though, we are clued-in on what prompts the sense of loss: it's the lack of the old values, the old decencies, which fell to "The rabble clamouring at the gates;" that, and the passing of youth. Making her way single-mindedly back towards some imagined Golden Age, Miss Raine vacillates between the patronising and the pompous, with nothing but her quaint use of language to offer the reader some (unintentional) light relief as she takes a periodic, petulant swing at those "Who serve the nihil of the age/And spray with weed-killer the flowers/ Patterned upon Venus dress." The reader will be happy enough to leave her by green bowers, listening to the curlews' immortal voices.
There was an infrequent but just discernible flicker of talent in Brian Patten's earlier books, though in The Irrelevant Song he has been at pains to get rid of whatever freshness his poems once possessed, opting instead for a lumbering, flatulent line: " • .. her body was one possibility among/Arbitrary encounters/And loneliness sufficient to warrant/A meeting of opposites." The poems fall back on whimsy as easily as they ever did, but that's scarcely enough to draw attention away from the shaky construction or the sheer lack of resources; nor are they to be salvaged by the introduction of an extravagant image or two.
If Patten has faults, though McGough and MacSweeney have them in spades.
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