I have been much absorbed in David Cope's poetry as necessary
continuation of tradition of lucid grounded sane objectivism in poetry
following the visually solid practice of Charles Reznikoff & William
Carlos Williams. Though the notions of 'objectivism' were common for
many decades among U. S. poets, there is not a great body of
direct-sighted "close to the nose" examples of poems that hit a certain
ideal objectivist mark-"No ideas but in things" consisting of "minute
particulars" in which "the natural object is always the adequate
symbol", works of language wherein "the mind is clamped down on
objects", and where these "Things are symbols of themselves. " The poets
I named above specialized in this refined experiment, and Pound touched
on the subject as did Zukofsky and Bunting, and lesser but inter- esting
figures such as Marsden Hartley in his little known poetry, and more
romantic writers such as D. H. Lawrence. In this area of phanopoeiac
"focus," the sketching of particulars by which a motif is recognizably
significant, David Cope has made, by the beginning of his third decade,
the largest body of such work that I know of among poets of his own
generation. Allen Ginsberg Table of Contents Foreword, Allen Ginsberg. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v THE STARS
The Line-up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . Empty Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The River. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . 4 Down on the Farm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 American
Dream. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . .
. . . . . . . Baseball. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . Crash. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. 9 . Lunch Hour. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter Camp. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Circle of
Lights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . .
. . . . . . . GO Labor Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . 14 . . . . . . . . . . . Peace. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
