Louis Cabri's Blog - Posts Tagged "raymond-souster"
Raymond Souster
Raymond Souster - Instagram Poet
https://www.instagram.com/raymond.sou...
Come Rain, Come Shine
review/show/2256697727?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
https://www.instagram.com/raymond.sou...
Come Rain, Come Shine
review/show/2256697727?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
The Social Visual
“Words are blind.”
Charles Olson offers that statement as counsel to Raymond Souster in a 1955 letter.
He’s wanting to dissuade him from using what I’ll try calling “social visuals” in his poetry, as in “What Can I Say”’s appraisal of a drunk couple seen Monday morning on the street, in Souster’s For What Time Slays (1955), that he had sent Olson, who responds, directly and frankly.
What Can I Say
by Raymond Souster
What can I say except that they were drunk,
that it was Monday morning—
the day after Sunday,
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except that the woman
could walk no better than the man,
that they held each other up as they walked,
that the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it,
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
as they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
Olson’s saying, in the letter: Don’t sacrifice the personal (“[...] and I don’t mean person as personality). I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us, with much coming at him, coming from him, the which is more complex than even any verbal composition can declare”), that is, don’t sacrifice the personal for a societal, humanist ideal that, as just one individual, you can’t deliver on anyway, poem thereby ending up reinforcing the very norms your poetics, Ray (aligned as they are with mine) intended to sidestep or even reject.
“You,” Ray Souster, poet! “is Yonge Street. Exactly what you despise,” Olson declares. “You is staying pavement (instead of the crack in it). You is linoleum.”
Turning Souster’s poem in Olson’s direction would mean assuming an equal footing — I’m going to press further meaning into that phrase — between the drunk couple and the speaker. Recognizing a shared ideal plane of humanity isn’t enough to create equal footing.
Notice it is their social differences cut in relief between speaker and couple. Presumably the speaker is going to work on a Monday morning, and the couple indifferent to the calendar. Presumably the speaker is sober and reasonable, has survived another Sunday in Toronto the Good. Presumably the speaker is somehow secure in their own life, their livelihood, enough at least to mock the established bourgeois in other poems of this collection — and all this, presumably, the couple has lost, or never had, and are now destined to be, or become, Outsiders (not Hipsters, Beats, or Dharma Bums).
Consider also the rhetorical address. What can I say — but to whom? for whom? Is this the proverbial water cooler chat among bank clerks the reader is invited to? Souster must have been working in the bank by '55. The speaker never directly engages with the couple, who remain observable at a distance, as if behind a glass of perception — a social visual. Nor do we learn anything about the I — it's a function, the liberal subject. What can I say remains an idiom on which to hang the incident. Given the speaker’s emotions (seeking “sympathetic magic,” as Olson puts it, with the social surround), that idiom could not be spoken to the couple within the scene, without great hypocrisy. Uh, gee, it happened. It’s done, is it. No take backs. I feel such pity for you I’m sick to my stomach. What can I say.... As to the emotion itself, pity, Olson probes the last line of the poem for its limits, countering them: “It just ain’t true. Number 1: no man has enough. #2: it ain’t pity anyhow anybody wants[…].”
Except for his very last book (dictated bed side, I believe), Souster really never veers that far or develops from the poetics imprinted in “What Can I say,” even while Souster endures over the years a litany of criticisms in hundreds of letters from Cid Corman pitched along the same Olsonian lines as Olson's 1955 letter articulates.
The Olson position re: Souster comes to this (from the letter):
“Society is no more than what is outside. Thus there is no more generalizing possible (sex crime sentimentality) as of the hoomins, than as of how nature happens to you — which is surely not as a tabloid falls down in the street.”
By generalizations Olson must mean not those based on facts but on mores (not quite the fully adequate word for this, however). Generalizations from facts are correctable (with facts). Mores are beyond error, can legitimize inequality, can run Portuguese sailing families out of Gloucestor.
Now top press further meaning into "equal footing." Olson practices equal footing variously, such as above: when he writes “I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us […],” it isn’t a blanket negation of the general in favour of the singularity of Souster, for he offers also a positive version of of the general on his terms (namely in the phrase: “like the rest of us” — we are all singularities).
The drunk couple is wanting in something, and for Souster, a way to think of it through a social visual. So let’s compare want in Olson. Olson brings about an equal footing between states of want in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, particularly among lines where the negative apostrophic address to Vincent Ferrini resurfaces, also in “The Songs of Maximus.” This equalizing footing is slyly placed, because while he’s deliberately arguing against Ferrini’s Whitmanian rhetoric for a poetry of “the masses,” of “the people,” he’s also arguing for his own version of same, of “my people,” of “the many” (“the many” as “the few”: “It is not the many but the few who care”) — hence the need to show equal footing: so that for every negative, there's a positive offered on/with different terms.
In “The Songs of Maximus,” Song 5 sets up the negative; and in Song 6, there's enacted a positive — equal footing.
“Song 5
I have seen faces of want,
and have not wanted the FAO: Appleseed
‘s gone back to
what any of us
New England”
Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), founded out of WWII, in order for liberalism to connect health (food, particularly malnutrition) to class (economics especially poverty). The “want” in lines 1 and 2 aren’t the same, nor possibly their situations: to “have not wanted the FAO” is likely not spoken by one of the “faces of want.” Is it: I have seen, and I have not wanted the FAO; or is it: I have seen, and they have not wanted the FAO. Or is it really: they agree with me! "and have not wanted the FAO." The Appleseed reference: seems so strikingly inapt, tending to mythify? Is there a pun on new/knew? Almost Frostian nativism?
The “faces of want” are specific faces; the generalization is the FAO, and the unquestioned belief that its bureaucracy can work.
Then comes Song 6, the equal footing:
“you sing, you
who also
wants”
Poet’s song has wants, too, so, hey, face of want. The personal is objectified via second and then almost third person. Done.
It can be taken as a sort of indulgence, this equal footing example from “The Songs of Maximus,” one that you don’t ever get in Souster.
Having dressed down Souster in Olsonian terms, let me now suggest another way to imagine Souster’s poem. I’m going to very simply cut it in two, in two aspects, calling the first, the social visual, and the second, the expressive I function (where lies Olson’s hope for drilling down to “Souster the man, like any of us”).
"What Can I Say" Cut In Two
Cut One: poem as social visual
they were drunk,
it was Monday morning
the woman
could walk no better than the man,
they held each other up as they walked,
the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it
they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Cut Two: poem as expressive I function (in Souster, as personal as it gets)
What can I say except
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
When you read Cut Two at face value, you get: boredom its theme (stanzas 1, 3, 4); and the speaker holds no faith whatsoever in the agential effectiveness of speech to change the world (stanza 2).
When Cut One's tense is changed to the present, the social visual becomes a rudimentary, or residual, Objectivists' text.
As editor of the Canadian double, Contact, from Toronto, Souster fared much better under Olson’s scrutiny than did Vincent Ferrini as editor of Four Winds, from Gloucestor, Mass. As poet, however, Souster fared no better before Olson than Ferrini did.
“Lyric’s instinct, // in our generation, derives value / from conflict,” writes Ron Silliman in Hidden, the eighth section of the Alphabet. I’m stretching “generation,” but the comment obviously applies. Later in Silliman's poem: “Thus an absence of conflict // is not peace.”
But what has Silliman to do with Olson and Souster? I suspect USAmericans aren’t used to having their poetry coming at them horizontally through another’s history. It is curious that I don’t start with the Objectivists, and instead, work through one Raymond Souster. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that poetry in Canada has a metacommentarial role in a broader crossborder poetics. Positions simplify themselves up here in a way that they don’t down there where they often stay complicated. This can be useful.
So I am temporarily proposing that what one often finds in Silliman is the “return” of the social visual, and therefrom, the general based on facts. That sort of Sousterian social visual in Cut One one finds everywhere woven into Silliman’s text, except — hold it! — there are undoubtedly enormous differences at all levels too, so great they will cancel my proposal. Dialectics!
For now, let me end this by saying that, in a dialectical mode, and literally, blind people outside are described in many passages of the Alphabet, and in Hidden, for instance, there is a colour-blind man, an optometrist’s carpet, and many references to eyes as both objects and portals.
Charles Olson offers that statement as counsel to Raymond Souster in a 1955 letter.
He’s wanting to dissuade him from using what I’ll try calling “social visuals” in his poetry, as in “What Can I Say”’s appraisal of a drunk couple seen Monday morning on the street, in Souster’s For What Time Slays (1955), that he had sent Olson, who responds, directly and frankly.
What Can I Say
by Raymond Souster
What can I say except that they were drunk,
that it was Monday morning—
the day after Sunday,
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except that the woman
could walk no better than the man,
that they held each other up as they walked,
that the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it,
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
as they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
Olson’s saying, in the letter: Don’t sacrifice the personal (“[...] and I don’t mean person as personality). I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us, with much coming at him, coming from him, the which is more complex than even any verbal composition can declare”), that is, don’t sacrifice the personal for a societal, humanist ideal that, as just one individual, you can’t deliver on anyway, poem thereby ending up reinforcing the very norms your poetics, Ray (aligned as they are with mine) intended to sidestep or even reject.
“You,” Ray Souster, poet! “is Yonge Street. Exactly what you despise,” Olson declares. “You is staying pavement (instead of the crack in it). You is linoleum.”
Turning Souster’s poem in Olson’s direction would mean assuming an equal footing — I’m going to press further meaning into that phrase — between the drunk couple and the speaker. Recognizing a shared ideal plane of humanity isn’t enough to create equal footing.
Notice it is their social differences cut in relief between speaker and couple. Presumably the speaker is going to work on a Monday morning, and the couple indifferent to the calendar. Presumably the speaker is sober and reasonable, has survived another Sunday in Toronto the Good. Presumably the speaker is somehow secure in their own life, their livelihood, enough at least to mock the established bourgeois in other poems of this collection — and all this, presumably, the couple has lost, or never had, and are now destined to be, or become, Outsiders (not Hipsters, Beats, or Dharma Bums).
Consider also the rhetorical address. What can I say — but to whom? for whom? Is this the proverbial water cooler chat among bank clerks the reader is invited to? Souster must have been working in the bank by '55. The speaker never directly engages with the couple, who remain observable at a distance, as if behind a glass of perception — a social visual. Nor do we learn anything about the I — it's a function, the liberal subject. What can I say remains an idiom on which to hang the incident. Given the speaker’s emotions (seeking “sympathetic magic,” as Olson puts it, with the social surround), that idiom could not be spoken to the couple within the scene, without great hypocrisy. Uh, gee, it happened. It’s done, is it. No take backs. I feel such pity for you I’m sick to my stomach. What can I say.... As to the emotion itself, pity, Olson probes the last line of the poem for its limits, countering them: “It just ain’t true. Number 1: no man has enough. #2: it ain’t pity anyhow anybody wants[…].”
Except for his very last book (dictated bed side, I believe), Souster really never veers that far or develops from the poetics imprinted in “What Can I say,” even while Souster endures over the years a litany of criticisms in hundreds of letters from Cid Corman pitched along the same Olsonian lines as Olson's 1955 letter articulates.
The Olson position re: Souster comes to this (from the letter):
“Society is no more than what is outside. Thus there is no more generalizing possible (sex crime sentimentality) as of the hoomins, than as of how nature happens to you — which is surely not as a tabloid falls down in the street.”
By generalizations Olson must mean not those based on facts but on mores (not quite the fully adequate word for this, however). Generalizations from facts are correctable (with facts). Mores are beyond error, can legitimize inequality, can run Portuguese sailing families out of Gloucestor.
Now top press further meaning into "equal footing." Olson practices equal footing variously, such as above: when he writes “I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us […],” it isn’t a blanket negation of the general in favour of the singularity of Souster, for he offers also a positive version of of the general on his terms (namely in the phrase: “like the rest of us” — we are all singularities).
The drunk couple is wanting in something, and for Souster, a way to think of it through a social visual. So let’s compare want in Olson. Olson brings about an equal footing between states of want in the opening letters of The Maximus Poems, particularly among lines where the negative apostrophic address to Vincent Ferrini resurfaces, also in “The Songs of Maximus.” This equalizing footing is slyly placed, because while he’s deliberately arguing against Ferrini’s Whitmanian rhetoric for a poetry of “the masses,” of “the people,” he’s also arguing for his own version of same, of “my people,” of “the many” (“the many” as “the few”: “It is not the many but the few who care”) — hence the need to show equal footing: so that for every negative, there's a positive offered on/with different terms.
In “The Songs of Maximus,” Song 5 sets up the negative; and in Song 6, there's enacted a positive — equal footing.
“Song 5
I have seen faces of want,
and have not wanted the FAO: Appleseed
‘s gone back to
what any of us
New England”
Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), founded out of WWII, in order for liberalism to connect health (food, particularly malnutrition) to class (economics especially poverty). The “want” in lines 1 and 2 aren’t the same, nor possibly their situations: to “have not wanted the FAO” is likely not spoken by one of the “faces of want.” Is it: I have seen, and I have not wanted the FAO; or is it: I have seen, and they have not wanted the FAO. Or is it really: they agree with me! "and have not wanted the FAO." The Appleseed reference: seems so strikingly inapt, tending to mythify? Is there a pun on new/knew? Almost Frostian nativism?
The “faces of want” are specific faces; the generalization is the FAO, and the unquestioned belief that its bureaucracy can work.
Then comes Song 6, the equal footing:
“you sing, you
who also
wants”
Poet’s song has wants, too, so, hey, face of want. The personal is objectified via second and then almost third person. Done.
It can be taken as a sort of indulgence, this equal footing example from “The Songs of Maximus,” one that you don’t ever get in Souster.
Having dressed down Souster in Olsonian terms, let me now suggest another way to imagine Souster’s poem. I’m going to very simply cut it in two, in two aspects, calling the first, the social visual, and the second, the expressive I function (where lies Olson’s hope for drilling down to “Souster the man, like any of us”).
"What Can I Say" Cut In Two
Cut One: poem as social visual
they were drunk,
it was Monday morning
the woman
could walk no better than the man,
they held each other up as they walked,
the woman took the lighted cigarette
out of the man’s mouth, dragged hard on it
they turned out of sight along the little street
leading to the railway tracks,
Cut Two: poem as expressive I function (in Souster, as personal as it gets)
What can I say except
long, endless Sunday,
boring, restless Sunday.
What more can I say except
as if that could make everything right again,
which of course it couldn’t,
which of course was impossible.
What else can I say except that I felt sick
Which could mean either, I suppose, that I have a weak stomach
or else so much pity to waste on the people of this earth.
When you read Cut Two at face value, you get: boredom its theme (stanzas 1, 3, 4); and the speaker holds no faith whatsoever in the agential effectiveness of speech to change the world (stanza 2).
When Cut One's tense is changed to the present, the social visual becomes a rudimentary, or residual, Objectivists' text.
As editor of the Canadian double, Contact, from Toronto, Souster fared much better under Olson’s scrutiny than did Vincent Ferrini as editor of Four Winds, from Gloucestor, Mass. As poet, however, Souster fared no better before Olson than Ferrini did.
“Lyric’s instinct, // in our generation, derives value / from conflict,” writes Ron Silliman in Hidden, the eighth section of the Alphabet. I’m stretching “generation,” but the comment obviously applies. Later in Silliman's poem: “Thus an absence of conflict // is not peace.”
But what has Silliman to do with Olson and Souster? I suspect USAmericans aren’t used to having their poetry coming at them horizontally through another’s history. It is curious that I don’t start with the Objectivists, and instead, work through one Raymond Souster. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that poetry in Canada has a metacommentarial role in a broader crossborder poetics. Positions simplify themselves up here in a way that they don’t down there where they often stay complicated. This can be useful.
So I am temporarily proposing that what one often finds in Silliman is the “return” of the social visual, and therefrom, the general based on facts. That sort of Sousterian social visual in Cut One one finds everywhere woven into Silliman’s text, except — hold it! — there are undoubtedly enormous differences at all levels too, so great they will cancel my proposal. Dialectics!
For now, let me end this by saying that, in a dialectical mode, and literally, blind people outside are described in many passages of the Alphabet, and in Hidden, for instance, there is a colour-blind man, an optometrist’s carpet, and many references to eyes as both objects and portals.
