Portraits in sass and solemnity

This book embarrasses -- it puts a bar in one’s way. At a time when poets are being installed as heads of the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation, and as Ruth Lilly leaves $100 million to Poetry magazine, American poetry looks like a stable, established tradition, a pat slide show beginning with Robert Frost and ending with Billy Collins. But what, in the words of this book’s author, about “great American sass”? With “A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude,” composed of portraits both photographic and written, poet Jonathan Williams throws a barricade across the way to easy canon making.

Williams’ book suggests to the young and expensively educated, such as this reviewer, that their universities have treated them to only a very particular slice of American literature. But it embarrasses in another, more important way: It is horny, disorganized and hideously alive. Williams exultantly quotes Kenneth Rexroth, on being asked why he writes: “To overthrow the capitalist system and to get laid -- in that order.” One could recall Elizabeth Bishop’s dismissal of Rexroth and shut the book, but opposite Williams’ prose is his 1955 photograph of Rexroth standing in San Francisco sunshine. He turns his head in profile, redhaired, with a wry, puppy-dog mien -- obviously, a character who should be saying what he wants.

Williams’ photographs remonstrate the reader with their specificity. Lorine Niedecker is not only a reclusive nature poet but also a grandmotherly woman, in butterfly eyeglasses, standing against a faux brick wall somewhere in America. Williams’ anti-establishment stance benefits enormously from these pictures. For the very obscure outsider artists he includes, the picture comes first, inviting the reader into the text. Carl McKenzie is an old fat white man in rural Kentucky, wearing an undershirt, looking at his carved blackbird through skewed aviator glasses. Elijah Pierce, “one of the greatest African-American woodcarvers,” stands before his barbershop, looking mean, dignified and incredibly old-fashioned in 1980.

But for the poets and other artists whom the reader will know by name, if not by face or poem, Williams’ portraits are a corrective. His photograph of Ezra Pound, taken in 1966 in Venice, Italy, shows a desiccated man, standing erect but with bowed head and closed eyes, as if the old impresario were not so much insane as simply beaten. Williams, in his knowing passive aggression, lists the people who have not heard of Louis Zukofsky: “Michael Jackson sure hasn’t.... Bubba hasn’t. Trent Lott hasn’t .... The English Department at Harvard hasn’t.” Harvard probably has, actually, but Williams’ point is taken. A man whose lifework was a study titled “Bottom: On Shakespeare,” which defied categorizing, does not invite weekend reading, but his face, so warm on the point of a Bill Cosby frown, does. Williams’ work is as palpable as his title.

Beyond embarrassing and thus challenging the reader, Williams’ intimacy animates his countercultural mission. Beyond honoring any particular persons, he is advocating an open, humanistic attitude toward art. He inoculates himself against sterile pickiness -- a critic’s need for “proof” -- by adopting a breezy diction.

About Charles Olson, Williams says, “The Big O would stick his music in your ear. You have to go to New England composers like Ives and Ruggles to come anywhere close. Charles, with his big eyes and glorious blarney, would say that he’d never heard of these guys. A bit of a laugh.” (Contrast that with diction from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry: “If Allen Ginsberg was the popular and spiritual leader of the postwar experimental poetry, Charles Olson was its leading thinker and strategist.”)

Ironically, though Williams’ writing is much more interesting, the Norton will often be more appealing, at least if one is trying to make a judgment about Olson. This is the paradox of Williams’ populism. While piling laurels on Robert Duncan, he pauses to admit: “We tend to over-estimate ourselves, we democratic poets with so little power of any kind.”

The democratic impulse is realized in his great interest in people such as Carl McKenzie and Elijah Pierce, people who are naturally unfamous. Williams is obviously frustrated with the gatekeepers of artistic success; does this lead him to “over-estimate” his friends? The real irony is that, inoculated against artistic mediocrity, Williams’ system automatically rejects the American majority. He urges those uninterested in his book to “go back to MTV.” He adds the halfhearted self-deprecation: “[P]eople now are horrible, but poets are worse.”

Elitist humanism, or visionary nostalgia, is not always easy to stomach. One is embarrassed on many fronts. But this book, with its photographs, lets the reader look over Williams’ shoulder to see what is behind him. Then, one is less embarrassed.