{"id":11106,"date":"2013-11-13T10:55:38","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T14:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11106"},"modified":"2013-11-13T10:55:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T14:55:38","slug":"ammiel-alcalays-a-little-history-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/ammiel-alcalays-a-little-history-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"Ammiel Alcalay’s A Little History Reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Here is Kevin Ring’<\/strong>s review in the UK magazine Beat Scene<\/strong> of a book I think of as one of the most important of the year:<\/p>\n

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This really isn\u2019t little history but a very big history that Ammiel Alcalay takes on. Stemming from Charles Olson\u2019s resignation from his position at the Office of War Information\u2019s Language Section, in a time when Olson was an unrecognised poet. Olson was dismayed at policies enacted by the American government. His resignation put him on a different path where he might truly have an influence. And, while the book has\u00a0Olson at its heart it also investigates\u00a0the role of the poet in the face of\u00a0\u2018official history.\u2019 How the media, the\u00a0government, let\u2019s be blunt about it,\u00a0the CIA, FBI and all other covert\u00a0government operations in the USA,\u00a0work to project their views, their\u00a0strategies and policies. Propaganda is a\u00a0phrase that springs to mind. It\u00a0happens in America, it happens here\u00a0in England, a creeping and secretive\u00a0strategy to present life, as we think we\u00a0know it, in such a fashion that makes\u00a0everything seem natural. The word. William Burroughs railed against it, a virus was the word you often visualise when you imagine the Burroughs campaign against being overtaken by various agencies.<\/p>\n

Alcalay illustrates how in mainstream American journals, the New York Times being an example, when- ever a poet is reviewed, Olson or whomever, there is a subtle play on their \u2018outsider\u2019 status, being labelled an outlaw fraternity, that somehow says to the reader that – ok, Olson is a rebel, but there his interest stalls. I think is what Alcalay is getting at. A subtle, or even, not so subtle marginalisation. You could see Jack Kerouac\u2019s framing as \u2018the king of the Beats\u2019 in certain quarters as another example of this. It seems to be a path that will end up as a dead end.<\/p>\n

A Little History is a very ambitious book, it takes in American poetry, the academy system, the government, above and below the waterline, history, the poets who have attempted to say things from outside the inner sanctum, Olson of course, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Ed Sanders, the Beat Generation as a group. Alcalay draws on his European heritage throughout and con- stantly questions the status quo in American poetry, perhaps trying to push it to a more central and influential position, with the types of poets that will not accept the landscape as it is. He\u2019s talking about control, about imagination, maybe how our imaginations are controlled\u00a0– often without us having an inkling that they are. I\u2019m short changing Ammiel Alcalay\u2019s book, it is bold, investigative in a way I think Ed Sanders has been for decades. Olson is at the heart of the book, Alcalay has been inspired by him, a poet now dead for almost 45 years. Yet his searching mind still impacts today. I spoke to Ammiel Alcalay recently to try and clarify aspects of this provocative book.<\/p>\n

Kevin Ring: You obviously consider Charles Olson as a pivotal figure in Twentieth Century poetry. He\u2019s the central figure of your A Little History book. Do you think he\u2019s \u2018relegated\u2019 by critics in the USA?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ammiel Alcalay: He has definitely been, as you say, \u2018relegated.\u2019 I think there are a lot of different reasons for that and I\u2019m not sure if I even touched on all of them in the book. Simply put, in an age of very diminished horizons, I think the scope of his thought is simply too broad. He turned away from what could have been a very successful academic career and then, to compound matters, he turned away from what could have been a very successful political career, all in order to become a poet. And this just at the start of the Cold War. Given that he is a major source for all that has been most vital in North American writing during that crucial period from 1950 till his death in 1970, and that everything he did was directly antithetical to the ways knowledge was being sliced and diced and shunted off to cordoned off\u00a0disciplines and terminologies, it\u2019s no wonder he\u2019s been, as you say, relegated.<\/p>\n

Kevin Ring: The scope of your book is vast, a little like Olson\u2019s scope. Did his mind, his vision, frighten people? I mean the people trying to read him. As well as the CIA possibly?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Ammiel Alcalay: What I hope I did in this book, I think, was to simply clear some of the debris surrounding Olson and establish the political and historical context for the radical nature of his work, and how large a force he was in creating the conditions for things that would follow, through the 1960s and beyond. This takes into account his transition from a New Dealer working for Roosevelt to someone who understood, at a very basic policy level, what the impact of the Cold War would be. It\u2019s no accident that Olson seeks out people with experience from the 1930s: Muriel Rukeyser, Edward Dahlberg and, perhaps most significantly, Vincent Ferrini in Gloucester. Vincent had been a union organizer and conscientious objector during World War II and I think their friendship, more than any literary relationship, was key. As someone from a working class background, Olson was also trying to re-establish his affiliations by refusing any and all advantages that the structure of the society was ready to give him, as an educated white male. Of course, he also saw all these societal changes in the way he conceptualized the \u201chuman universe,\u201d what that might mean in terms of pedagogy, politics, and historical consciousness. Such things, of course, would be scary to all governmental agencies of intelligence gathering and repression, as Olson\u2019s primary focus was on personal empowerment through each person\u2019s own ability to gather and, more importantly, USE intelligence! We can see this in the work of people who were so fundamentally influenced by him: Ed Dorn, Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and so many others.<\/p>\n

ISBN 978-0-9760142-6-3) Paperback www.upsetpress.org<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is Kevin Ring’s review in the UK magazine Beat Scene of a book I think of as one of the most important of the year: This really isn\u2019t little history but a very...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,36,37,42,91],"tags":[148],"class_list":["post-11106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-criticism","category-cultural-studies","category-essays","category-poetry","tag-ammiel-alcalay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11110,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106\/revisions\/11110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}