David Ossman, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Dylan Thomas: The Firesign Theater Meets the Sullen Art
In poetry, start anywhere; don’t end at the right margin; you will go to surprise.
In 2000, David Ossman continues as a member of the seminal spoken word comedy troupe, The Firesign Theatre, still shaking the ear of the future. Amiri Baraka reigns as a leading voice in US poetry, a devastating political analyst, the fieriest and coolest of performers. Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966, continues to influence generations of writers from his site as Chief Poetry partymeister of the New York School. And Dylan Thomas, with his “Do not go gentle” and “Death shall have no dominion” and “Under Milk Wood,” is world renowned as the utterer of Welsh poetic magic, the embodiment of Poet.
And now, to weave these disparates to write a poem of poetry....
In 1960, a young poet, David Ossman, flipped media and began a series of radio interviews with poets for the NYC Pacifica station, WBAI. He called the series “The Sullen Art,” after the Dylan Thomas poem: “In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages.” He would collect a sonnet of these recordings into book form, with the same title, published in 1963 by the model of small press publishing, Corinth Books. Most of the interviews were with poets from a movement little mentioned today, but that Ossman was certain would become the leading edge of poetry: the Deep Image group, including Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg.
An interview of special note was with Baraka, then LeRoi Jones. One question zinged to the heart of the NY School, a question still debated: Is O’Hara’s (often first) name dropping a conversational technique to bring in the reader, or an elitist trait to mythologize his buddies? Jones’s answer still stands as an ace.
--Bob Holman
Ossman: I’d like to have your thoughts on a kind of contemporary writing that could be illustrated by Frank O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” in Yugen 6. In it he describes his thoughts before and after having lunch with one “LeRoi.” With its highly and specifically personal references it seems to be more of an anecdote of interest to future scholars than something partaking of the heightened qualities of a more traditional poetic nature. What is the validity in this kind of writing?
Jones: I didn’t think that there was any charted-out area in which the poetic sensibility had to function to make a poem. I thought that anything -- anything you could grab -- was fit material to write a poem. That’s the way I think about it. Anything in your life, anything you know about or see or understand, you could write a poem if you’re moved to do it. I’m certain that if they have to footnote what the House of Seagrams was in this poem, or who the LeRoi, was, that will only be of interest to academicians and people doing Master’s theses. Anybody who is concerned with the poem will get it on an emotional level -- or they won’t get it at all. Certainly, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t go through any book to look up those names with the hope that I would feel moved once I knew where the building was or who LeRoi was. I don’t think that means anything at all. I don’t think that has anything to do with the poem, actually. What the poem means, its function, doesn’t have to do with those names -- that’s just part of it. It doesn’t seem to me to be the same kind of stupidity that’s found when you have to go to Jessie Weston’s book to find out what a whole section of “The Wasteland” means. The House of Seagrams is certainly less obscure than certain Celtic rites. And I don’t see what makes it any less valid because it’s a casual reference or that it comes out of a person’s life, rather than, say, from his academic life.
