| Ezra's
Dream
SAS POETS REALIZE MODERNIST'S VISION
Was there any greater watershed in American poetry than
the meeting of undergrad Ezra Pound, G’06, and med
student William Carlos Williams, M’06, Hon’52,
in a Quad room at the turn of the 20th century? Many of the
budding artists who gathered around the young modernist poet
regarded Penn, with its emphasis on linguistics and historical
scholarship, as a den of philistines. In decades-long correspondence
to his old advisor, English chair Felix Schelling, Pound
urged the university to establish a creative writing fellowship
or endowment for poetry. Schelling dismissed the upstart
poet as a “weed.”
Only in retirement did the old professor concede that there
was “something to be said for Mr. Pound’s proposition
involving the encouragement, even in academic circles, for
the creative spirit.” Today, with at least five poets
in the English department, the weeds are blossoming all over
campus into the garden that Pound had dreamed about.
The poetry revival at Penn goes back to the opening of Kelly
Writers House in 1995. Once the home of the university chaplain,
the gothic Victorian house on Locust Walk retains its aura
of enlightenment, except these days it’s English professor
Al Filreis carrying the torch—preaching the gospel
of contemporary writing. Filreis, the Kelly Family Professor
and faculty director of Writers House, says the faculty founders
wanted to create “a free space in which poetry and
poets can flourish outside the curriculum”—free
of the “academic caste system.”
Bob Perelman came to the English department in 1990 with
an impressive CV—master’s in classics from Michigan,
M.F.A. from the Writers Workshop at Iowa, and a Ph.D. from
Berkeley—not to mention eight collections of verse
and one book of criticism. He’d left behind a revolutionary
writing community in California that he’d helped to
build. Often referred to as the Language Poets, they were
a loose alliance of writers whose work was distinguished
by its atypical syntax, humorous language, and political
messages.One of the chief wranglers of this herd of cats,
Perelman organized poetry groups, talk series, and readings
in San Francisco. When Writers House opened, he instinctively
took up the cause of recruiting speakers and visitors. The
early guest list reads like a Who’s Who of innovative
contemporary poetry. “That’s how you make a rich
farm,” explains Filreis. “You nourish the soil
and then things will grow out of it. Bob came and nourished
an interest in this kind of writing and in poetry in general.” More
writers followed.
One of the most vocal regulars at Writers House was a New
Yorker named Charles Bernstein. At the same time Perelman
was mobilizing the West Coast poets in the 1970s, Bernstein
co-founded an East Coast literary magazine called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
a photocopied, coverless, stapled booklet. Published until
1981, while Bernstein made a living as a medical writer,
it was one of the biggest little magazines of the period.
Not only did it give the emerging genre a name, it jump-started
the careers of dozens of poets and critics, including Bernstein’s.
The renowned poet and critic joined the English faculty
in 2003. Even before classes started in September, Bernstein
had grand designs, the first of which was PENNsound (www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/),
a project to digitize poetry readings and distribute them
on the Web. Still in its embryonic stage, the website will
be a repository for the voices of poets—the celebrated
and the not-so-famous—reading their works. “I
think that poetry is an acoustic medium,” he says, “and
the performance and recording of it is as fundamental as
the printed version.”
Sound recordings of poetry are a basic part of Bernstein’s
undergraduate courses, or, as he calls them, “reading
workshops.” In a mahogany-meets-Intel classroom in
the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), poems
are often displayed on a plasma-screen TV while Bernstein
cues up the audio files. “The reading performance becomes
a very integral part of the students’ experience of
poetry,” he elaborates. “You can’t underestimate
how important audio recording is.
The amount of information that’s conveyed in an audio tape is much greater
than possible with the alphabet.” In his experimental writing seminar,
Bernstein emphasizes collaboration. Throughout class, his students pass around
a wireless keyboard and punch in lines to an evolving poem. These quilts of
words are often witty and interesting, but the poet-instructor insists the
main goal is to get students’ fingers dancing, “ to constantly
have them writing and thinking about writing.”
That objective prevails throughout the rest of 3808 Walnut,
the newly formed Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing,
which houses both the creative writing and critical writing
programs. Situated in the backyard of Writers House, the
restored building is populated by advisors who counsel undergrads
on genres from short stories to term papers. Greg Djanikian,
C’71, head of the university’s ballooning creative
writing program, plays the role of main mentor.
Djanikian returned to Penn in 1983 as an established poet
with a flair for lyrical, narrative verse. He has published
four books of poetry, dealing with everything from his Armenian
heritage to the relationships of husbands, wives, and lovers. “His
poems tell stories,” says former Writers House director
Kerry Sherin, C’87. “They are true to the emotion.”
In the 1960s, Djanikian recalls, “there was no place
to hang your hat, no place to go talk about writing” at
Penn. The establishment of Writers House and CPCW solved
that problem, but now, Djanikian says, the writing buzz has
bled into the curriculum. Over 100 English majors concentrate
in creative writing, and the number of creative courses has
climbed to an all-time high of 18, including four on poetry-writing.
With demand outpacing supply, Djanikian and Filreis have
proposed changes to the English major that incorporate a
new creative writing “emphasis” as well as a
minor for non-majors.
The biggest obstacle to writing poetry during the academic
year, notes Djanikian, is finding the time. A semiannual
pilgrimage to Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga
Springs, NY, is his solution. Every book of his poetry, except
for the first, was the product of these trips. In 2003, he
participated in a sort of tribute run by Filreis and attended
by Penn alums. For three days at Frost Valley in the Catskills
last spring, Djanikian’s poetry was read, discussed,
and celebrated. He even test-drove some new material.
English professor Herman Beavers, the honoree of this spring’s
Frost Valley seminar, echoes the need for a community of
writers. He says the group at Cave Canem “affirmed
an experience that I’d had and made me realize that
I wasn’t crazy.” Cave Canem describes itself
as a “safe haven for black poets—whether schooled
in M.F.A. programs or poetry slams.” Beavers was newly
tenured and trying to balance an academic career with his
creative passions in 1996 when he attended its inaugural
retreat. Desperate to test out some new fiction-infused poetry,
he found a fraternity of poets who connected with his stories—tales
about the death of his father, economic hardship in Cleveland,
and the love of jazz.
One of Beavers’ proudest achievements at Penn is the
Brave Testimony series at Writers House. Started during National
Poetry Month in 2001, Beavers invited five African-American
poets, including several Cave Canem standouts, to read from
their work. The long-awaited sequel will take place this
spring.
While some poets find reading aloud to be, in Bernstein’s
words, “ a fundamental function of poetry,” others
are not nearly as enamored of the public exercise. Susan
Stewart, Gr’78, the Donald T. Regan Professor of English,
falls into that group. After a Ph.D. in folklore, Stewart
developed as a poet-critic teaching at Temple University.
She returned to Penn in 1997 with a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.
Her verse is infused with allusions to classical and Biblical
figures, and the subject matter runs the gamut of human experience—memory,
the senses, loneliness. In her teaching, she aims to convey
to graduates and undergraduates the “long history of
poetry.”
While the soft-spoken poet frequents Writers House events—and
often invites fellow poets to appear—she rarely picks
up the mike herself. “I don’t like to read very
much—not more than two readings a year.”
One such occasion took place last October, when Stewart,
Perelman, and Bernstein organized a conference called Poetry
and Empire: Post-Invasion Poetics. On a shoestring budget,
they enticed 35 poets to come to Writers House and the Institute
of Contemporary Art for a weekend of discussions and readings
on the situation in Iraq and the political effects of poetry. “We’re
living in a culture where public information isn’t
reliable,” Stewart observes, “and abuses of language
surround us”—misuses that can beget and justify
war.
“ Our job is to enable people’s literary dreams,” offers
Jennifer Snead, C’94, the current director of Writers
House. In her first year on the job, the former English major
is helping groups of student writers start up two new literary
magazines, and she’s pulled together marathon novel-reading
sessions. “I’m reliving my undergraduate days
the way I wanted them to be,” she says.
For Ezra Pound, the relation between poetry and politics
was a vexed one. The troubled poet is perhaps more famous
for his treasonous rants against the Allies during World
War II than the verses he first imagined in his early years
at Penn. Just before his death in 1972, the first creative
writing classes emerged on campus. Now, 100 years after Pound’s
Quad-room readings with fellow poets, a garden of creative
writers is thriving here.
Ted Mann, C’00, is a former
English major.
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