The Sullen Art

by David Ossman

This book features interviews between David Ossman and famous contemporary poets from the late 50s and from the beat movement.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

David Ossman is an American writer and comedian, best known as a member of The Firesign Theatre and screenwriter of such films as Zachariah.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early in 1960, the idea of 'The Sullen Art' [sullen, from the Latin solus - alone] as a continuing series of radio programs inquiring into the source and future of contemporary poetry was born. I chose deliberately at that time to interview the younger poets and, inevitably, that group of poets categorized as 'new', (or sometimes and quite erroneously, as 'beat'). By the end of that summer, I had recorded ten informal conversations. . . . The remainder were recorded later in 1960 and during 1961. . . .
- from the introduction by David Ossman

Interviews with some of the most renowned American poets to emerge from the 1950s, with emphasis on the so-called "New American Poets" featured in Donald Allen's Anthology, including: Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Carroll, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Robert Bly, John Logan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Creeley, W. S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Edward Dorn, and Allen Ginsberg...

You say: "The problem of poetry is the problem of communication itself." What do you feel about your own poetry in terms of what it communicates?

Well, that's another thing - I've never understood why I'm a member of the avant-garde. I write more or less like Allen Tate thinks he writes - like the great Greeks and Romans and the Chinese, and so forth. I try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life, which I think will be of significance to others on a similar level - that is, which will touch them in significant regions of their experience. And, I suppose that my whole attitude toward poetry - toward my own poetry - is to keep always before myself an objective of clarity and depth, and hope that out of this you'll get exaltation.
- from the interview with Kenneth Rexroth


What is your poetic aesthetic?

I don't know any more. I was born and raised a Roman Catholic and it gets into your imagination. I used to think that poems were kind of telegrams from angels - like from another world. I really felt that deeply. Now I don't believe that. My own poems are attempts, the only way I have, to make sense out of my own existence and the world around me to understand who I am and what my friends are involved in.
[...]
- from the interview with Paul Carroll


Is there one thing more than any other that moves you to write a poem?

No - not one thing. I suppose that one has certain ideas about the world one lives in an the kind of life one leads (or is forced to lead, or would like to lead). Very different things can strike one in terms of a poem. Put a person in varied landscapes or cityscapes and he is surrounded by life - you find out a lot about the quality of the city or the country and the quality of the person. This is very valid material for poetry. What else is there? The man in what surrounds him. That he loves or hates, or just hears and sees.
- from the interview with Paul Blackburn


What is your poetic aesthetic?

I think that what I'm looking for is a king of poetry that will probe deep, in terms of statement and through images, without being untransmittable. I always want to be direct in speaking, although I realize that I'm not dealing with material that, on the face of it, seems to be direct. I don't think that in learning from movements like Surrealism, (to name one that everybody knows; I'm, God knows, not a Surrealist), one has to get into a kind of sense murky poetry which doesn't communicate itself. I think that somehow, miraculously, what the Surrealists and the post-Surrealists, (but more precisely, those who began to explore a kind of "deep image" from, say, Rimbaud or Whitman on), hit on was not a poetry which obscures communication, bu a poetry of the most direct communication possible.
[...]
- from the interview with Jerome Rothenberg


Is there any one experience, more than another, that prompts you to write a poem?

It's something that I do. I don't know how to stop writing them. I don't know what the impetus is - or, I guess, we can all say in one theoretical way or another what the impetus is and we all know in one real way or another what the impetus is, but can we verbalize them? Have any people succeeded in verbalizing that impetus? The conformation of necessities in the unconscious, the conformation of shapes and structures that demand expression - I think it is that, or sometimes the song, the sound of music of some kind.
- from the interview with Robert Kelly


Are there any poets now working in this direction?

I see a few. I personally don't think that a writer like Henry Treece, who is discussed as an English Surrealist, really is one. There are several kinds of surrealism. In one sort, you break the structure of the conscious mind, so that the conscious mind is not able to understand the poem. Sometimes in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Lamantia, you will find this kind of surrealism - in which the conscious mind is unable to understand what is being said. But, in a sense, this is a negative surrealism, a false surrealism. There is another kind which simply disregards the conscious and the intellectual structure of the mind entirely and, by the use of images, tries to bring forward another reality from inward experience. I see a few young writers using this: James Wright has broken abruptly, and is writing a king of poetry which resembles that of Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Other young poets - I think Jerome Rothenberg has written three or four poems which involve true surrealism.
- from the interview with Robert Bly


How do you, as an academician, feel about the current revolt against the "academic" in poetry?

That's like your question about the religious in poetry. It has to be good and it can't be dull. If academic themes in poetry means something pedantic, textbookish, the poem's not going to live.
[...]
- from the interview with John Logan


What moves you to write a poem?

An idea. A feeling.

An intellectual thing, rather than an object in the visual world?

You can't say it's one thing or the other. It's the way perhaps every poet writes a poem. One sees something or becomes aware of something, and something occurs int he brain in which you see the possibilities for a poem. A poem becomes possible, dealing with that particular thing, and then all that remains to do is write it.
[...]
- from the interview with Gilbert Sorrentino


Don't you think many of the contemporary poets are Romantics themselves?

Sure. All of the Beats are Romantics. Every single Beat alive is a Romantic. They're Romantics in the worst sense - they're ego-mad, they think that whatever they say about themselves other people will be interested in. It's not true. No one is interested in the "I" of the poem, unless that "I" is projected through a mask. Yeats has taught us that.[...]
The Romantics failed art. They failed art a hundred years ago. Pound, Williams, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, For Madox Ford, Joyce spent their lives destroying a decayed structure. Now, sixty years after the groundwork that they laid down, we're erecting another decayed structure on top of it with this neo-Romantic kind of burble.
- from the interview with Gilbert Sorrentino


What do you understand by "Deep image"?

It's the question of symbol. I don't want to say "picture" because that's not accurate. It's what is in the poem as a ind of statement in the sense "a house", "a car", "a field" - the image projected by the statement - as opposed to how the statement is registered. I can't really discuss with any responsibility what they are involved with. They seem to come primarily from the French Symbolists - or specifically I think the Surrealists, the German Expressionist writers of the period around the Fire World War - Trakl, Gottfried Benn, and now the present German writers who seem to have reasserted that interest. The Spanish writers such as Lorca, Jimenez, and Machado, people of this order whose poems are a fabric of images.
[...]
- from the interview with Robert Creeley


Why do you think there is a resurgence of interest in poetry?

That's a hell of a big question. I think the penny's dropping, that's why. Or I think that's one reason - the feeling that there's not much time and it can't last the way it is. If a feeling of crisis goes on long enough, I suppose, one of two things happens - either a person or a society becomes numbed or they get interested in poetry. This has happened in practically all the wars you can think of since the time of the Industrial Revolution. The great periods when the people were interested in poetry, though not necessarily the great periods for writing it, were times when something critical was, at least, in the wind. Having said this I immediately think of a whole barrage of exceptions.
- from the interview with W. S. Merwin


Can you give me your statement of faith as a poet? Your aesthetic?

First of all, I believe that the gift of being able to write poetry must always be considered as a gift. It's a responsibility, where one considers it given by God or Nature. It's something which the poet must take seriously. His responsibility is not to himself, not to his career, but to poetry itself. Therefore I believe in craftsmanship, I feel that every piece of punctuation, every comma and every colon, is a serious matter and must be duly considered. Punctuation is a tool, all the parts of punctuation and of grammar are tools, and one must use them efficiently.
- from the interview with Denise Levertov


Is there a middle ground between natural speech and formal metrics?

Oh, yes. I don't mean that I write poems completely the way I'm talking now, although I'm certain that a great deal of my natural voice rhythm dominates the line. For instance, my breathing - when I have to stop to inhale or exhale - dictates where I have to break the line in most cases. Sometimes I can bring the line out longer to effect - you learn certain tricks, departures from a set method. But mostly it's the rhythms of speech that I utilize, trying to get closer to the way I sound peculiarly, as opposed to somebody else.
- from the interview with Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones)


The line seems to be one of the most important structural considerations in your writing. What is it about the shape of the line, and its relation to your own way of speakign?

In the first place, one inevitably talks about measure and line. It, for some off reason, remains a technical preoccupation without people knowing very much about it. By very many people, I mean even master poets. I frankly know very little about it. I know what meter is, and I know the names of the various meters,and so forth, but the way I write is really in clots and phrases, and that usually comes out to be Idea, in a vague sense. I don't think Ideas come in units. When the individual line ceases to have energy for me, in those terms, I usually break the line there, with certain exceptions.
[...]
- from the interview with Edward Dorn


I asked if he were addicted to "joy"

Joy? No, I wish I were addicted to joy. I'm addicted to worry - I'm a worry-wart.

Why? Your poems seem so expansive . . .

Yes, but do you realize how much anxiety I have to go through to get that expansion? I have to see Death, and think I'm seeing Death, and scare myself to Death. To play with my shadow in the mirror. It's terrible.
- from the interview with Allen Ginsberg

[Guylaen O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (along with the accompanying audio CD) was an amazing revelation to me about the lives of the Beatniks.

This is placed next to Kill Your Darlings to round-off the completeness of the era.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brief, insightful interviews with major (mostly "New American") poets from Firesign laureate David Ossman's early 1960's radio program.