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"Carl Rakosi's determined honesty and reductive rhetoric with its
ungainsayable
plainsong have made a measure
for
all conduct of words in the attempt
to
find an active poetry in the
fact
of lives without power."
--Robert
Creeley
With great pleasure we invited
friends and colleagues to join us
with poet Carl Rakosi,
who joined us from his home in San Francisco. The program was
be audiocast live worldwide,
introduced by poet Tom Devaney and co-moderated by Al Filreis.
Many participated
by coming
to the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk in Philadelphia,
where we
conversed directly with Rakosi by an amplified telephone
connection. That conversation was
audiocast, and thus some 40 others joined us, wherever they
were,
by
making a simple connection to
the web.
Carl Rakosi began publishing his poetry in the 1920s. His work was
published
by Ezra Pound and others in magazines assoicated
with a group of writers now known as the "Objectivists." His
Collected Poems was published in 1986 by the National Poetry
Foundation. His Poems 1923-1941 (published by Sun and Moon
Press)
won the PEN Center USA West award in 1996. Carl Rakosi
lives in San Francisco.
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As distinct from Stevens, where prosody is focused in accentual pulse,
Rakosi
projects the line as full unit of measure, the
compressions or extensions of which aim to trace the interplays of
phenomena
and reflective thought. Composition in this
mode, in that it grounds itself, in Zukofsky's famous phrase, in a
"thinking
with things as they exist," operates--and
must--outside any paradigmatic metrical structure.--Kent Johnson
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Carl Rakosi: "My big struggle always was trying to find an occupation at
which I could make
a living and still have time and
energy to write. I tried many different things. It seemed to me I changed
almost every year. Nothing seemed to work. Finally
about 1939, 1940, in desperation I decided to try to get a Guggenheim.
Hell,
I thought, maybe that would break this thing. If not,
I'll at least have a year in which to write. Well, the history of that is
a
bit comical. I wrote the three people who I thought would
think enough of my work to recommend me, Williams, Stevens and Marianne
Moore, and sent them my little chapbook,
Selected Poems. Williams wrote back saying that he'd be very glad to write
something but it would be a mistake if he did it, I'd
never get a Guggenheim then. Stevens made some acute observations on my
work,
gave me very high marks on parts of it, but
he wouldn't write. There's no sense to it, he said. The Guggenheim people
are
just as capable as I am of judging your work,
they don't need me. Marianne Moore gave a very sensible answer too, but
wouldn't write for a different reason. I had the
mistaken idea that a candidate had to submit a project of some kind, so I
cooked one up. My proposal was to write on the
psychology of the poet, using insight from my experience in psychotherapy.
She thought that was a very unpromising subject.
So I never applied. It didn't seem possible to make a living, have a
family
too, which I was starting to have, and to write. When
I tried it, it kept me up all night. You can do that two or three nights,
but
you can't do it as a regular thing. So I stopped. For
twenty-seven years."
Rakosi on the 1930s: "A new American rose had sprung up, blooming where
you'd
least expect it, in the
agony of the Great Depression when it seemed like half the country was out
of
work and ready to explode, the unemployed
organizing and storming the relief offices, when true-blue Americans who
had
never thought much beyond the morning news
and football became radicalized. The stakes had become too high to do
nothing. Capitalism had obviously failed. Change the
damned system! An enormous energy shot through the country. The writers
and
artists, most of whom were living in New
York then, were steeped in it and very quickly began to express it. The
thing
that was new in our situation was the
confrontation with reality, what was happening all around us to the
American
people. There was no way to duck it. Faced with
that, we weren’t going to play intellectual games or hold forth from an
ivory
tower and we couldn’t go to Europe or the past
for models. We had to deal with the present and the present was American
and
idiomatic. The action took place in the WPA,
which at one time seemed to be providing work for every writer and artist
in
America, me excepted -- I already had a job in
social work -- but I was in that current anyhow. Everything looked
possible
then. The task of the Federal Writers Project and
the other projects was to discover and portray America. And that was fun.
And
a great public mission. It was done most
eloquently, I think, by the photographers ... Dorothea Lang, Imogene
Cunningham, Margaret Bourke-White in those bleak,
stark photographs done for the Farm Security Administration, my first
encounter with great photography, photography that had
an American face, that had power and depth. In the theater Clifford Odets
and
Marc Blitzstein and Elmer Rice were
electrifying young audiences with the power and passion of their new
plays.
And the writers were working away with a great
eye for detail on those masterpieces of cooperative writing, the guide
books
for the then forty-eight states. And the painters
were there with wit and satire and poignancy -- Reginald Marsh, Adolf
Dehn,
the Soyers. There was an unmatchable
buoyancy and exhilaration in the air and in us, welling up, I think, from
the
fact that society had recognized our work and had
given us a place and a function and was paying us for it and was acting as
if
we belonged, and for the first time we felt that we
did. I don't know whether this had ever occurred before; certainly not
since.
And the fact is that the writers and artists
responded with complete seriousness and clarity and in particular a love
for
and interest in reality."
Read Tom
Devaney's introduction to the program.
Writers House
Webcast Archive
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