>Date:         Tue, 2 Jul 1996 03:55:34 -0700
>From: Ron Silliman (rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM)
>Subject:      Irby's ear
>
Keith,

The best way I know to demonstrate Irby's ear is by example. These are
the opening lines (first section) of "Heredom," the first poem in
Orexis (Station Hill, 1981):

lobe of opalescent glass
     broken in the irreplaceable lampshade

out of the shoulder, the corridor
     down the street the kids from junior high
        come by in t-shirts for the warmth of February
                                                       pigeons overhead

     stamp and cry in their sleep

gathered, the branch of acacia
     fused through the green swirled
          Egyptian thorn milk waters
raised, itself, of the lost and gathered body of mastery

or all the highschool years again, unslept, review the annual faces
                                                       [over and over
     till they run green in the movies after the eyes are closed
           and still as distant as they were in person

                      the society of the ordinary
                  highschool days, never left, will it?

                  against the society of the widow's son, those
                        who on the elephant's back
                                 be freed?

the generation of mourning doves' cries
     is from twilight in the mind
                                  releasing and attracting us

------------------------------------------

I hope your screen reader doesn't muck with the line breaks (I had to
insert one "[" myself).

Just following the progression of the 'l's 'o's 's's etc from the first
two lines makes me dizzy with pleasure, noticing how "lampshade" sets
up "stamp" later, all the way to the contrast in the final line between
the liquid consonants of "releasing" versus the hard "tt" and "ct" in
"attracting" (not even wanting to make a case, though I think there's
one to be made, for the way that line mimics the cooing and feather
settling sound of doves). I don't think anybody's done a better job
than Kenneth at understanding how Olson used to the caesura in his
breath defined line (and these lines seem to me not an instance of the
projective in that simplistic organic metaphor, but rather each is a
construct). I find "gathered, the branch of acacia" to be breathtaking
in how that comma works. I've been reading the poem maybe twice a year
now for 15 years and it never gets old.

You are right about Kenneth having been disappeared likewise. A little
like Enslin, it has had to do with the fact that sometime around 1980
or so little magazines that sought to carry forward some sense of the
Olsonian project just stopped cold, combined with Kenneth's return to
Lawrence, KS, to take care of his mother (the widow of the above poem)
during her last years and his own very reticent nature about putting
his work forward. I spoke with him last about two years ago, when the
veterans of the Free Speech Movement were searching out folks who had
been active in the FSM at Berkeley in 1964 and Lowell Levant, a
Berkeley poet of those years and friend of Irby's (and now a truck
driver out of Union City), was on the list. Kenneth said he'd seen and
talked to Ronald Johnson just once since his own return to Kansas, so
it would appear that Kansas is a state one can indeed get lost in (Mr.
Dole, please follow suit).

Station Hill/Tansy did a big collection of the late '70s poems, Call
Steps: Plains, Camps, Statioins, Consistories, in 1992. Orexis is
reprinted there. It's probably still available from SPD and I recommend
it heartily.

Further note to the Oronians: it is very intriguing seeing the comments
about, in particular, the talks given by Steve Evans and Ben
Friedlander, but for the life of me, I cannot divine from any of the
comments what was actually *said.*

(And Von Hallberg pulled that same stunt at an Oppen conference at UC
San Diego about 10 years ago, declaring Oppen to be a "tedious" poet
with onerous politics on a panel.)

Ron Silliman
rsillima@ix.netcom.com