I began this blog with a promise to be strict with myself, to write every day in at least some format. At times I was afraid that my blogging had ovewhelmed my ability to write in other genres--poetry and translation, particularly--because blogging is so much more readily avaiable and requires much less precision and concision. And yet, in the month that I (thought I) didn't have blogspot access, I realized that my writing habit was held together by the linchpin of the blog: if I weren't conscientious about updating my blog, I would have no impetus to do any real writing whatsoever. Perhaps the idea of publication, or public accountability, fueled the drive, but regardless, I brought a fountain pen to Beijing but never filled it with ink.

While I wasn't writing, I was reading more poetry than I had earlier achieved. Though that didn't translate itself into translating--something else I thought I'd get to while in Beijing--it did mean that I filled in some gaps in "contemporary" American poetry (I also finished some novels, finally, but I suppose I'll write more on that later): Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a bit of Robert Duncan (I also read, and reviewed for future publication, the new English translation of Jacques Roubaud's latest). Because I still largely understand very little of the work of each of these poets, I'll take advantage of this space to process through my reading of their poetry.

I'll spend the next few days turning my thoughts into blog entries, but today I'd like to spill some general comments about the three poets I read this summer. First, I made a conscious decision to read the poets in chronological order. The question of context has always troubled me: in the past, I went as far as to deny it, idealizing a context-free purely textual innocence of literature, and while I certainly no longer support such naive demands of a text, I do think that at some level any piece of literature needs to be able to stand on its own. Of course, the more I interrogate the phraseology of "standing on its own," the more I realize that nothing ever can: even the most basic text is dependent on a knowledge of the language, and all texts are at some level social, referential, and dependent on something beyond themselves. And so I figured that one could read Zukofsky best after reading Pound, and read Olson best after reading Zukofsky and Pound, and read Duncan best after reading Olson.

[Ginsberg I threw in there as something else to contend with before I got to Duncan, but in many ways reading Ginsberg was the biggest personal challenge for myself. I went through a week-long Beat phase, just like everyone else, in high school (I remember my parents wondering who I was on the phone arguing with when really I was reading Howl out loud), but after a (not much) deeper look at their surface facility, I gave up on them: a bit too much style and not enough substance, I figured. I also trace my disillusionment with the Beats to two coincidences surrounding Ginsberg. First is the eminent teachability of Howl and "America," which I consider more a problem of the poem than of teachers: the poem lend themselves more easily to tight explanation than to exploratory re-reading. Second is the question of where else someone in the '90s is going to look for more Ginsberg work: that decade was a big lowpoint of his writing, and it was easy to give up on ol' Allen and his friends.]

But in 20th century literature, which if nothing else has broken the idea of the line, why should literary history be so linear? Why should I read Zukofsky only after having read Pound, Duncan only after reading Olson? If I really wanted to give myself a firm background before fiddling with the foreground, I probably should have read all of Marx, Shakespeare, and Melville, too, before touching Zukofsky or Olson. I probably should have learned Chinese before reading Pound, instead of learning Chinese because of reading Pound. In fact, the fact that I read Pound before knowing Chinese should be enough to kick me away from a strict adherence to literary history as a cause-&-effect program. And yet, for some reason I still believe that influence is traceable, and that literature develops, if not towards some teleology, then at least upon the advances made by the previous generations. At the moment I'm at a loss to say whether this is maturity or regression on my part, but it did make it easier to pull those books off the shelf, rather than stay staring at the bindings, wondering whom I should read first.