John Hart

THE ACTIVISTS

"Activists Take Over Poetry Magazine,” read a press release issued in May 1951 by the American journal. The invading Activists were not a political movement but a literary one. A more accurate name for them might have been the Lawrence Hart Group; a good adjective, in hindsight, might have been Neomodernist. At a time when the Modernist impetus in literature was already starting to flag (as hindsight now makes clear), the Activists were seeking to drive it onwards in their field of poetry; to celebrate its achievements and to criticize its failings; and to wrestle systematically with its unsolved problems.

The Activist project was then about fifteen years old and enjoying a brief summer of prominence. First notable publications--New Yorker, Yale Review—date to 1939. In 1941, Activist Jeanne McGahey had been featured in New Directions’ Five Young American Poets. In 1948, Robert Horan had appeared in the Yale Series of Younger Poets; in 1949, Rosalie Moore had followed in that series. Publication had been piling up in such outlets as Poetry, Quarterly Review of Literature (a multi-poet feature), East and West, and Furioso. The group had just begun its own journal, Number. It appeared to be rather a coming thing.

But ten years later, as far as public awareness went, Hart and the Activists would be gone from the literary “scene,” as if they had never flashed across it.

Where did these people come from? What were they trying to do? And where did they, quite suddenly as it seems, disappear to?

The last question is the easiest to answer. The Activists—in the sense of a series of poets pursuing a certain set of approaches—did not go anywhere at all, and constitute a thread in the American poetry fabric to this day.
 
Lawrence Hart
 
The story has to begin with Lawrence Hart. Like Ezra Pound, whom he resembled in his ferocious opinions, the vastness of his reading, his lack of formal credentials, and his distrust of received wisdom, Hart was born in a remote mountain setting: a ranch outside Delta, Colorado, called Harts Basin. A year younger than the Twentieth Century, he was the son of Harry Hart and Anna Pope and the descendant on his father’s side of a local pioneer family.

This frontier heritage would fascinate him later, but he had no contact with it as a child.[1] His parents were estranged; his biological father soon absent and mentioned only with bitterness; his stepfather A. H. Davis abusive. The unhappily blended family moved continually around the West as Davis, a railroad man, followed work. Shaking free as soon as he could, young Hart kept on wandering, accumulating the kind of experiences that would read well on a book jacket: organizing a revolt against compulsory military training at his high school in Santa Rosa, California; working as a roughneck on a southern California oil rig; canning fish in Alaska; bicycling the half-completed U.S. Highway 101 in the northern California redwood region and camping with a labor gang of prisoners; beginning and abandoning a career as a reporter.

To the stresses of his early life Hart had a classic if uncommon response. Seeking some foundation in a shifty and often hostile world, some strategy for living, he embarked on a study of religions and philosophies. He read the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Confucians, the Stoics, the Pragmatists. (He would wind up, eventually, as a species of modified Gnostic.) He read just as widely in history, and found himself fascinated with this question: What is it that creates a period of vigor in the arts and culture? That he himself was maturing in such a period—the years of Imagism, Cubism, Dada; the prime years of Pound, Rilke, Valéry—escaped him entirely.

Though a few capable teachers gave him his head, hardly anyone guided him in these explorations. It appears unlikely that he would have accepted any guidance. Rather, he seems from an early age to have been contradicting and instructing everyone around him, rarely to much applause.

Among the things he was reading was poetry: not poems but poets, whole lifetimes of verse from the first line to the last. Vast stretches he memorized. Somewhere along the line he absorbed a truth that academic students of literature, in their dedication to a chosen subject, may seem to overlook: that the landscape called poetry, for all the peaks it contains, is also full of plains of metrical plodding and valleys of barely inflected prosaic chatter. He marked and memorized the passages he liked best and began to ask himself by what criteria he chose them.

In the late 1920s, Hart settled in San Francisco. Seeking out artists and writers, he lived first on Telegraph Hill and later in the famous old Montgomery or Monkey Block at Montgomery and Kearny Streets, a warren of studios that was the city’s informal artists’ colony. (The TransAmerica Pyramid stands there today.) In the 1930s he got involved with the Barter Movement, a social experiment that arose in response to the economic hard times. Cold-shouldered by the New Deal as too radical, it was at the same time infiltrated by orthodox Communists, who sought to make it a front organization. Finally, it fell apart in dissension.

Hart was now writing poetry of his own and getting some of it published. He wrote reviews for several publications and did some criticism for local writing circles. He also started a literary magazine, coincidentally also called The Talisman, which lasted only two issues. Later on, when someone mentioned having a copy, he would ask to borrow it, and destroy it.

As the Depression deepened, he kept himself going with various government-subsidized jobs. In 1934 he was serving as a probably superfluous night watchman on a construction site when a fellow-worker made the suggestion that might be said to have begun Hart’s real life: Why didn’t he apply for a teaching post, also an option under the Emergency Work Relief program?[2] He applied, was accepted, drummed up some students, and began telling people how to write poetry.

Was he qualified? By his own later account, not remotely.

The Talisman—copies of which in fact survive—bears out this rueful self-assessment. Lawrence Hart in 1934 was a stylistic conservative, behind the times, out of touch with the live currents of the day. A hopeless provincial. In one editorial, he takes after literati “whose writings, while not overly intelligible, are supposed to mean something or other from a psychological standpoint, and who enjoy exaggerating their little eccentricities so as to create masterpieces of deliberate mystification.” Just so might the Activists themselves have been attacked, later on, by puzzled readers.

Every teacher knows it: there is nothing like explaining a subject to others to reveal how imperfect is one’s own understanding. In his first several years of teaching, Hart’s attitudes underwent a revolution.

He was apparently not yet thinking of starting a group, style, or movement. But he took his modest teaching platform as a chance to test one of the ideas he had developed through his readings in history and sociology. This was his vision of cultural democracy: of a nation in which many or most people, not just a self-selected few, would understand the arts and work seriously in them.

At first glance this seems a conventional hope. But when Hart talked about a sharing of the arts, he had much more in mind than mere exposure, inspiration, or pleasurable dabbling. He determined to adopt, as a probably false yet useful assumption, the idea that any student of poetry, however seemingly ill-equipped at the start, could produce writing of a very high caliber. If this did not occur, he declared, he would blame his own failure to teach.
 
The education of a taste
 
Work of a very high caliber: but how was he, and who was he, to judge?

Some years earlier, he had begun to wrestle with the problem that faces any honest practical critic: by what authority does one set up one’s own reactions as a standard for others, perhaps in opposition to prestigious authorities? His first response was to exercise, challenge, and solidify his taste. He set up for himself a kind of global tennis tournament of poetry. Beginning with poems and passages he already knew—the seeded players, so to speak—he matched them off in pairs. He would read one passage aloud, then the other, then the first again, until it was clear to him which he preferred. Then he would pair off the survivors, and repeat. As newer work came to his attention, he would enter it into this ongoing competition.

The result was an elaborate set of lists, again a bit like the rankings by which the sport declares tennis players to be the first, or tenth, or ninetieth best in the world. In early years, he recalled, his estimations would go up and down wildly; but with many repetitions and shifting pairs of matches, his opinion would settle, often in ways that surprised him. Of the contemporary work of the 1930s he first fed into this machinery, Elinor Wylie held up better than most; Robinson Jeffers started high and moved progressively down the list. Among older poets, the Romantics fared increasingly poorly, and Milton climbed. (Like Pound, Hart took no account of era, inquiring only as to the effect of writing on a contemporary ear.) W. H. Auden, barely noted in the first rankings, moved up and up, and T. S. Eliot came to occupy the pinnacle. In a very late form of Hart’s canon, the top 30 poems include no fewer than ten Eliot pieces, seven by Milton, five by Pound, two by Auden, and one each by Bryant, Coleridge, Gray, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Whitman. (He limited the field to poetry originally composed in English, so his touchstones Dante, Mallarmé, García Lorca, and Perse do not appear.)

If the very top tier in Hart’s listings included poets of several periods, the second and third tiers contained, above all, the Moderns, among whom he found a consistency of brilliance unmatched by any other period—and, as Clive James has pointed out, not necessarily striven for in any other period: “This wish for the thing to be integrated by its intensity seems to be fundamental, although it might be wise to allow for the possibility that it has taken the whole of historic time for the wish to become so clear to us.”[3] Lawrence Hart did not know James’s writings, but would have concurred.

It’s important to note that there is no poet that Hart thought was writing poetry in every poem. “Even the great,” he was heard to say, “are not continuous.” And: “There are no good poets, only good poems.” Eliot he saw as an extraordinary near-exception.

Soon after he began teaching, Hart opened a second front in this research. He began typing up anthologies of individual lines and short passages that seemed to him to exemplify particular poetic effects or strategies. He would then further analyze, subdivide, and retype these lists, attempting to put his finger on the precise technical means being used. In later years, lines selected from his own students came to dominate the example lists. Even the secretarial element of this project, in pre-computer days, seems staggering; but again it enabled him to speak with the authority of someone who had paid his analytical dues.

Activist Rosalie Moore, in a poem of tribute, would capture something of his approach:
 
          You, Lawrence Hart, had better carry a crux-bug,
               jump-bob, tick-nut:
          Wind up the palm to show--
          Say This makes it go.[4]
 
One of the characteristic Modernist attitudes has been to emphasize the technical basis of the arts. Hart took this as far, perhaps, as anyone has. Though he certainly acknowledged the role of inspiration, and sought ways to encourage the emergence of surprising, perhaps unconscious content, he had no patience for the idea that certain poetic effects are inexplicable, ineffable. If some group of words stands out, leaps up, impresses itself on our minds, there is a reason.
 
Building poems from the line up
 
Hart started with the commonsensical insight that only some of the poetry written in any era is destined to last. He wanted his students to aim high: to make their lodestar not the good-enough or publishable, but the enduringly valuable.

He distinguished two routes to that end. In the ancient and always more common procedure, the poet builds poems, so to speak, from the outside in, filling out a plan or following a series of impulses. Really striking passages may (or may not) emerge of themselves along the way. The nineteenth century spoke of “felicities,” indirectly acknowledging that much of any longer poem would consist of a kind of filler. “It is possible for a writer to begin with something very much like prose and to lift this material into poetry,” Hart acknowledged.

He offered, however, a second approach, one aimed directly at producing the “felicities.” “I see no reason why it is not practical to begin instead with brilliant if fragmentary poetic detail, and [then] work toward order and clarity.”[5] He urged his students to aim first at writing strong lines and only later tackle the problem of assembling such units into poems. He thought this progression from small effects to large, though difficult enough, would allow more people to create valuable work. This was the “Activist” path—which any participant in his classes walked on, for a shorter or longer time.
 
Three tools: Direct Sensory Reporting
 
Hart would later regard it as good fortune that few of his first students were conspicuously talented. Rather, he faced roomfuls of people who could not take what was, to him, the unavoidable first step: to give up relying on tired, used-up metaphors in the attempt to communicate emotion and experience. Repeated criticism did not change these habits, and neither did various exercises designed to produce fresh comparisons. Finally, he asked his students to try writing descriptions of physical objects only, and without any use at all of metaphors or similes, in language of the severest simplicity.

So began the development of the exercise he called Direct Sensory Reporting. It had a negative and a positive side. The negative component was simply the avoidance of all comparison, all speculation, all abstraction. But the mere stripping down of language could go only so far. To make a description pleasing to the reader, one needed to find a new way of illuminating the subject. The solution was to add a few sensory details, precisely and concretely observed. A frequently cited model by Robert Frost:

          Sprays of honeysuckle
          That when they're gathered, shake
          Dew on the knuckle.[6]
 
Frost didn’t write “dew on me,” Hart would emphasize, or “dew on the hand” or even “on the skin.” Prompted perhaps by the rhyme, the poet specified: “Dew on the knuckle.”

Faced with the objection, “I can’t think what to say,” Hart would inevitably send the student back to the model, the goldfish, the flower arrangement, the cat, the hand observed in the act of writing. “Don’t think,” he would respond. “Look.”

This very early poem by Activist Jeanne McGahey grew almost directly out of that discipline.
 
          WARNING BY DAYLIGHT[7]

          This is the corner, look four ways at stone.
          Watch in two streets a wind
          In the rattled and paper autumn.
                      (This to be dreamed of,
          In some dark waken and hear the heart strike fear.)
 
          Pages against the grating
          Turn war and the Katzenjammers, someone named Talbot
          Or merchandise.
                      She leaned out from a window,
          Held apart curtains.
                       I saw her face
          True Romances, the hair yolk-yellow,
          And the pearls lay out
          On the tight satin, and she held a cup
          That was blue and empty: and whatever it was she said,
          Or whether she laughed, I saw her mouth move with it,
          Dental and bright.
                                  But it was the stone I heard
          And gutter of leaves.
                                   And seeing how the wind
          Blew big the curtains, and her red-cluttered hand
          Twisted the cord, even before I woke
          I saw she was the death that I had come for.

Though several techniques are in play, this is above all a poem of observation. At the intersection, we “look four ways at stone”; a wind blows down two of the four directions. (Who has actually remarked on this?) A newspaper flaps, and particular items glimpsed in its pages are named. The woman’s cup is “blue and empty”; what she says is inaudible, but her mouth is seen to move. Details are chosen for a dreamlike effect, and lined up in support of the menacing final statement.
 
Three tools: Double Imagery
 
After some months of the strangely difficult Sensory Reporting exercise, the student would advance to the second step: the construction of original similes and metaphors, which Hart preferred to think of as “double images.” The more surprising the objects brought together in the metaphor, he taught, the more force it would have―if it didn’t tip over into the ridiculous. The principle had been defined in 1918 by the dean of the French Surrealists, Pierre Reverdy:
 
          [The image] cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less
          distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and
          true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.[8]
 
For distant and true Hart would substitute the musical terms discord and accord.

His examples from the literature ranged from images quite easily grasped, which he called “semi-realistic,” to fantastic flights in which the original subject of the comparison almost disappears, called “romantic”:
 
          And the golden seed of the fire[9]
 
          A South Wind that carries fangs, sunflowers, alphabets
          and an electric battery with suffocated wasps.[10]

The following highly imagistic poem by Rosalie Moore grew out of an experiment: the attempt to plot a poem like a piece of music, with a succession of moods or colorations. The first section is, as it were, pizzicato; the second aims for a sense of strangeness and menace; the third brings a lyric accord. The piece may be read as a succession of attitudes toward death and the deceased, or simply accepted as the tone poem it is.
 
          FEAR BY HANGING[11]
 
          What a battle the dead make among the kitchen knives
          Racketing, and plucking the harps of forks.
          Oh the faucet is shedding silverware―
          Oh from their play I fly―
           I retreat like a storm of plates.
 
                         In a small upstairs hill
                         A bird is sharpening.
                         Always and always, visiting the rounds of hill
                         With their gulfed kings, I feel the rising of
                         The knights taller than wells―
                         And the dark in their throats is a man tall with hanging.
 
                         Under their floors are seas: their old machines, their anvils.
                         There watch you walk not loud,
                         But hearing a whine in belfries,
                         Turning three times on a cold heel.
 
           But oh, the dead coming
          Are cliff pushing on cliff in a march of walls;
          Their gable voices are calling down wells on wells;
          They come with a filling of bells.
 
          Into our low grasses, with their daylight of poppies,
          The horses softly charge―being more, to the dead,
          As clouds are.
 
Three tools: Poetic Statement
 
As they worked, most students began feeling the need to deal with ideas or abstractions more directly. Hart searched the literature to see how poets have done this without lapsing into flat, prosaic language—how they have made us feel, rather than merely understanding, their ideas. Two key variants he called Simple Statement and Cross Category. Simple Statement is a crystalline yet somehow unexpected formulation of an idea. Dante and Auden provided many of his examples:
 
          I am Beatrice who send thee; I come from a place where I desire to return; love
               moved me, that makes me speak. [12]
 
          Their fate must always be the same as yours,
          To suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,
          Holders of one position, wrong for years.[13]
 
Cross-category works in a more obvious way, by replacing an expected word with a parallel yet startling one, often from another realm of experience:

          These are the hearts you falsified[14]
 
               For all the pools at my feet
          Accommodate blue now[15]
 
 “Accommodate” might be said to replace the more predictable “reflect,” and “falsified” deepens the underlying meaning of “betrayed.”

The Moore and McGahey poems above each have statement elements mixed with other techniques. A third early Activist, Robert Horan, relied more on statement, less on visual imagery, than his colleagues; he also was more attracted to meter and rhyme.
 
          ANTIPHONAL SONG [16]
 
          What is it eats the hunter’s breath
          as he picks through the thicket?
          The blood that’s bound to bleed to death
          like a leak in a bucket.
 
          What is it tires the oarsman so
          as he climbs the chaste water?
          The love that he leaves and the winds that blow
          him on green miles after.
 
          What is it drains the drinker there
          at the jumping fountain?
          The desert he crossed that brought him there
          and the next mountain.
 
This seems to be a poem about cost, about the price we pay for our quests, whatever they are: and it seems also to be a poem about time-hauntedness. The hunter looks ahead to the death of his quarry (or his own?). The oarsman looks back to a lover left behind. The drinker is not really present at the fountain, at the moment his thirst is slaked, but looks away to struggles past and future.
 
From passages to poems
 
After making progress in precise sensory description and the creation of bold, successful metaphors—usually followed by some exercises in statement—students would finally burst the initial constraints and turn to whole poems. At this stage they became something more than students, if not quite peers: rather co-explorers of the problems of effective expression. Distinct voices quickly emerged. Lawrence Hart would sometimes applaud, sometimes offer detailed criticism, and sometimes intervene with a suggested assignment, if the writer seemed to have reached a dead end.

All these poets now confronted the challenge built into the ground-up approach they had followed so far: how to make individually vivid phrases and lines work together in paragraphs and poems. The first leap—from line to integrated stanza—was often the hardest. This was especially so for writers whose penchant was for bold, concrete, metaphorical imagery.

Hart did not (like Harriet Monroe in the famous exchange with Hart Crane) insist that each imaginative departure make some kind of literal sense; but equally he did not (like Crane responding) defend bold combinations for their own sake: the wilder the better, to be sure, but the image must create a satisfying experience.[17] Hart felt that such poets as Crane, Edith Sitwell, and Dylan Thomas, for all their brilliance, had been defeated by this further problem, while the Surrealists had simply ignored it.

Hart and his student-colleagues spent years exploring techniques for stacking brilliant images one on another without anarchy. One of these techniques he called Connotation Line. The principle was to choose metaphors so that the objects brought in as comparisons (the Bs of “A is like B”) themselves had certain qualities in common, permitting them to chord rather than to clash. Rosalie Moore was a master at it.
 
          SHIPWRECK[18]
 
          Watching, watching from shore:
          Wind, and the shore lifting,
          The hands raising on wind
          And all the elements rising.
 
          Calmly the wreck rides,
          Turns like leviathan or log,
          And the moon-revealing white turns upward
          (Upward of palms, the dead);
          And all of the sea’s attack, small tangents and traps,
          Is wasted on it, the wind wasted,
          Helpless to wreck or raise.
 
          Often in sleep turning or falling
          A dream’s long dimension
          I rock to a random ship:
          The one like a broken loon,
          Clapping its light and calling:
          The one bug-black, signing its sign in oil;
          The telegraph-tall, invented--
          Moved by a whine of wires;
          The Revenge riding its crossbar,
          Raising its sword hilt:
 
          And I know their power is ended, and all of the dreams
          Too vacant and inhabited:
          The ships with lights on their brows, the mementos, the messages,
          The cardinals, couriers to Garcías; [19]
          And after it all, they say,
          The ships make more noise than the sea
 
          And I look again
          At the equal ocean
          With its great dead ship.
 
Jeanne McGahey praised this poem especially for its central, virtuoso burst of images about the doomed ships:
 
          The one like a broken loon,
          Clapping its light and calling:
          The one bug-black, signing its sign in oil;
          The telegraph-tall, invented--

          Moved by a whine of wires;
          The Revenge riding its crossbar,
          Raising its sword hilt . . .
 
Even if removed from context and simply placed in a list, all of the major words reinforce one another connotatively. McGahey would ask, “What if Moore had written instead, The one like a broken cup? Or the submarine ebony black? Or the ship treetop-tall?”[20] In the last four lines, the series of cross-shapes—telegraph poles, crossbars, swords—is classic Connotation Line.
 
Formation of a group
 
To back up a bit, Hart quickly developed a reputation as an exciting teacher. When the emergency education funding ended, he was able to transfer his classes to adult evening schools in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. He soon began to attract writers of greater promise or prior accomplishment.

The first of the future Activists to arrive was Jeanne McGahey. McGahey, thirty-one years old and married to a Berkeley policeman, was busy writing narrative scripts for what was called the Coast Network (Yellow Cab Storyteller). She already had acceptances from The New Republic. She was, however, dissatisfied with her poetic skills, feeling, as she said later, that she didn’t know where to go next.

McGahey liked to tell a story of her first glimpse of Hart. He was having an unusually hard time putting across the concept of Sensory Reporting to a student set in his ways. “But, Mr. Hart,” the victim was saying, “the flowers were dancing!” Losing his classroom poise for once, Hart turned his back, slumped against the blackboard, and muttered, “Oh, my God.” McGahey was smitten. Joining the class, she seized on Sensory Reporting, not as the onerous exercise it certainly also was, but as a stylistic tool she could incorporate immediately into her work.

It was also in 1937 that Rosalie Moore began studying with Hart. Moore, who held a master’s degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley, had just quit a radio job to stake everything on a writing career. A member of the California Writers’ Club, she brought a whole contingent from the local chapter to Hart at the Technical High School in Oakland. Like McGahey, Moore felt doors opening. “I had had other creative classes or poetry appreciation courses,” she wrote much later, “but nobody before had given me a channel and a method that I could use so productively.”[21]

Robert Horan was 13 years old when his mother Carolyn saw a newspaper item about the Oakland classes and started attending with the boy. A youngster of obvious brilliance and great charm, Robert was reportedly one of the subjects of a study designed to follow the progress of children with very high IQs. He took to the disciplines Hart offered with extraordinary speed.

By 1938 these and a couple of other talented writers were meeting with Hart in private. At this stage there was no tuition. Rather, a bargain was struck. The members of the early group agreed that, as they gained recognition (an outcome that none doubted), they would use their stature to promote one another and Hart himself. They would, in short, provide him the prestige, the platform, that he otherwise completely lacked. This intrinsically unstable arrangement seems to have worked for a number of years.

It will be evident that the Activists were not a group in the sense of a fixed cast of characters or of a convergence of peers. They consisted of people who, at a given moment, were working with Hart at an advanced level and who saw value in presenting a common front. Of course the roster would change. It must also be noted that people who had studied deeply with Hart found it difficult to leave, sometimes experiencing the move as an act of rebellion. One of the first to depart was Robert Horan. In 1943, he moved to New York, where he lived for a time with composer Giancarlo Menotti before returning to the San Francisco area, where he did not resume contact with his former poetic colleagues.

At the same time, a subset of the Activists were creating tighter bonds by marrying one another. In 1942, Rosalie Moore married Jeanne McGahey’s brother, Bill Brown. In 1944, McGahey, now divorced, married Hart. The Activists were once described as a group based on family; it would be truer to say that the group incidentally gave rise to a family.[22]

And what about Hart’s own poetry? He spoke of it little, and only one mature piece was ever published. His papers have so far yielded only a few more lines. Although more material may come to light, it does appear that Lawrence Hart the poet disappeared into, and animated, Lawrence Hart the teacher. By not exposing his own work, he also kept a certain special status.
 
Robert Barlow
 
Robert Horan’s place was effectively taken by Robert Barlow, another brilliant, and a rather romantic, figure. He had been a part of the circle of fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft and went on to a brilliant career in Mesoamerican studies. Along the way he became an accomplished Activist poet. Initially very skeptical of Activist experimentation, he simultaneously mocked it and modeled it in the poem “For Rosalie,” concluding:
 
          o her eyes were like
          eyes with spigots in them
          peering through a melanesian gloom
          on hybrid horses, and the Nisaean plain
 
          (receptacle of moonlight) blasting with plum trees
                                  (minnesinger’s)
          where the                                aspect
                                  (messenger’s)
          blotted a beetle [23]
 
This is a deft pastiche of a typical Moore worksheet, including the retention, to the very last minute, of alternative wordings. It also captures Moore’s sprightliness and humor.

Hooked in spite of himself, Barlow went on to produce polished poems drawing on his growing anthropological expertise:
 
          THE GODS IN THE PATIO[24]
 
                      Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, México, D.F.
 
          Fifty bones of a murdered world are on view today at eleven. Guests will please smuggle cameras and check their
          tips. Have the gods herded into some cave, their clumsy joints all bent in the direction of flight: Is there a spider
          hanging its gourd in the jar of Tlaloc, where rain once shook golden rings? Are all the Cholula plates broken?
 
          O Tiger Knight, I saw your torso like a maize-ear, I saw the rusty roses on your garment. I saw princes who would
          be beautiful if they were statues, who envied only the snake, the jaguar and the ant. How long must they lie, the
          robbed and fragrant dead, by the Snake Wall, the Coatepantli?
 
Barlow worked with Hart from 1940 to 1947, when he moved permanently to Mexico. Correspondence trailed off. On January 2, 1951, he committed suicide, leaving a note on his study door in Mayan pictographs: “Do not disturb me. I want to sleep a long time.”
 
Making an impression
 
The 1940s were years of intensive marketing, mostly conducted by Lawrence Hart in the role of (unpaid) agent. His diligent correspondence with the likes of James Laughlin of New Directions, James Angleton of Furioso, Theodore Weiss of Quarterly Review of Literature, John Crowe Ransom of Kenyon Review, and several editors of Poetry produced placements in all these journals and group features in several. In 1941, Laughlin selected Jeanne McGahey’s The White Box for the second volume of Five Young American Poets, alongside sections by Paul Goodman, Clark Mills, David Schubert, and Karl Shapiro.[25] In 1942 and 1943, first McGahey and then Rosalie Moore received the substantial cash award named for recently deceased San Francisco philanthropist Alfred M. Bender.

In 1945, George Leite invited Hart and his colleagues to produce statements of theory and practice for his Berkeley magazine Circle, producing a section (and offprint) called Ideas of Order in Experimental Poetry; this is sometimes regarded as the Activist manifesto.[26] Hart’s contribution, “Some Elements of Active Poetry,” develops an idea he traced back to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. Esthetic or connotative meaning, said Croce, is too often thought of as a mere illustration or adornment of literal or denotative meaning. Instead it must be recognized as, so to speak, a co-equal branch:

          There exists a very ancient science of intellective knowledge, admitted by all without discussion,
          namely, Logic; but a science of intuitive knowledge is timidly and with difficulty admitted by but
          a few. Logical knowledge has appropriated the lion's share; and if she does not quite slay and devour
          her companion, yet yields to her with difficulty the humble little place of maidservant or doorkeeper.[27]
 
 
Hart sketched two parallel ladders of meaning, each mounting in complexity. On the literal side it led from dictionary definitions to “the comprehensive rationalistic philosophy”; on the esthetic side, from sensory impressions to “the comprehensive esthetic intuition.” Thus there was something fundamentally wrong with the question, “What does this poem mean?” The question must be “What experience does this poem produce”—which might or might not be followed by a translation into “sense,” as from one alien language into another.

This argument was in part a response to the Stanford critic Yvor Winters, who maintained the need for rational frameworks in poetry.[28] Such arguments would continue. John Crowe Ransom, responding to a submission in the late 1940s, wrote: “I like the two lady-poets [Moore and McGahey] best, and in fact I like them a good deal. But I gag at the theory, the heroic, quixotic theory: that they must resist the ordering that could unify the poems. In my theory the prime essential of a poet is the gift of association and free meaning, but it is technically or formally subordinated to the scheme or order; without the latter, the poem falls apart.”[29] Hart was as worried as anyone about poems “falling apart,” but sought alternative means of holding them together.

Hart speaks here of “Active” poetry, yet the word “Activist” appears nowhere in these contributions. At this time the label of choice seemed to be “Associationalist,” referring to one non-logical approach to ordering paragraphs in a poem. It is unclear when “Activist” was adopted. Once it was, it became necessary to explain, over and over again, that no political stance was implied. Poetry, of course, would play on this very ambiguity in its 1951 press release.

Robert Horan had given the group one of its first credentials with an appearance in Yale Review in 1939. Years after his departure he provided it with another breakthrough. In 1948 W. H. Auden, then editing the Yale Series of Younger Poets, was unimpressed by the year’s submissions.  Friendships in the New York opera world led him via Menotti to Horan. The result was A Beginning, the poet’s only book. Comparison of A Beginning with Hart’s files shows that most of the poems in the volume had in fact been written, or at least begun, in Horan’s years with Hart, and Hart cheerfully claimed it for the group’s resumé.

The following year, Rosalie Moore submitted to the same series, also meeting Auden’s favor for The Grasshopper’s Man and Other Poems. Moore inscribed a copy to the Harts: “Lawrence Hart and Jeanne [McGahey] Hart, their book.” In this introduction, Auden recognized the Activists, and sought to place them in the landscape:
 
          The history of poetry is an interaction of two histories, a history of theme and a history of
          treatment, of the various answers given, on the one hand, to the question, “what kind of
          relations, situations, persons, objects, etc., excite the poet most?”, and, on the other, to the
          question “how is that excitement most accurately and completely transmuted into the
          medium of poetry?” In each case, development is the outcome of a continuous struggle between
          two diametrically opposed principles. In the history of theme these are: 1) “nothing shall be
          excluded which does in fact excite the poet’s passionate concern,” and 2) “everything shall
          be excluded which does not really excite the poet as a poet.” Thus there is always a party
          (every poet is necessarily a party man, though he may switch sides) which is seeking to
          extend the range of theme against traditional conceptions of what is a “poetic” subject,
          e.g., low life as a subject for tragedy, and a party seeking to limit poetry to its true concern
          as against its improper uses, e.g., teaching or journalism.
 
          Similarly, the party which, in treatment, upholds the principle “everything which is
          relevant to the subject must be expressed” stresses the importance of intensity as against
          triviality while the party of the principle “everything which is irrelevant to the subject must
          be excluded” stresses clarity and unity as against obscurity and disorder.
 
          Miss Rosalie Moore is a member of the Activists, a group of poets associated with Mr. Lawrence
          Hart, who may be described as adhering to the exclusive principle in regard to theme and the
          inclusive principle in regard to treatment.
 
Hart & Co. read this statement with some astonishment. After his valuable if somewhat rambling analysis, Auden had gotten  the punchline exactly wrong. The Activists were inclusive with regard to theme—anything is fair game for poetry—but unusually exclusive with regard to treatment—anything must undergo a considerable transformation to be counted as poetry. Hart would later have contact with Auden at Mills College, and claimed that the eminent poet acknowledged his slip. I have found no documentation of this.

In 1951, Karl Shapiro, now editor at Poetry, returned a batch of Activist work, suggesting instead that Hart guest-edit an entire issue devoted to the group and its approaches. The issue appeared in May, with contributions by McGahey, Moore, and fourteen others. Hart contributed a note on the group and a separate one on Robert Barlow. He assessed the work on offer with characteristic moderation: “The selection of poems in this issue of Poetry may seem very uneven, partly because of the sequence in which some of the poets are working out their technical problems . . . . In a sense they sometimes do stammer, but I think they stammer in poetry.”[30]

The issue also includes a letter from William Carlos Williams suggesting an affinity of the Activists with the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Williams had developed a fondness for some of the most adventurous Activist work; later in 1951 he wrote of Moore: “It is shocking for the uninformed to look at a Picasso or to pick up a poem by Rosalie Moore. He can’t understand them. He will never understand them until he has CHANGED within himself.”[31]

As a result of the Poetry feature, Hart was invited to teach writing at Mills College in Oakland, California, then a women’s school. During five years here, he tested the assignments developed for aspiring poets with undergraduates and also with a select group of high school students brought in for a demonstration class. This experiment marked the beginning of decades teaching creative writing to children in and out of Bay Area public schools. Most of these youngsters were classed as “gifted,” but Hart would also work successfully with youngsters who had failed high school English.

It was also in 1951 that Hart (essentially Hart, though others were listed as editors) began publishing a magazine called Number, which continued for eight widely spaced issues until 1955. Devoted almost exclusively to work by Hart’s students, it also includes some highly interesting back and forth about methods and problems, and showcases a good deal of the best work done at Mills.

In 1958 came another invitation from Poetry. Henry Rago, who had succeeded Shapiro as editor in 1955, asked Hart to guest-edit a feature titled “Activists: A Sequel.” This September 1958 issue provides a nice snapshot of the Activists twenty years after their founding. Besides the perennial McGahey and Moore, it included contributions by Robert Brotherson, Waltrina Furlong, Marie Graybeal, Emily Pausch, Betty Turnoy, and Marie Wells.
 
Waltrina Furlong
 
Of the new voices, Waltrina Furlong’s was perhaps the most striking. She evoked mystical states and philosophical questions in imagery of striking boldness, as in this somewhat later poem:
 
          NOR I[32]
 
          Then he said, Of course this is what we all must do
          But we cannot change, here and now under the marquee
          While the rain continues, starting freshets in the blood,
          For very soon the aged blossoms reappear
          and I do not intend to stop them,
          Nor you, nor you, nor you,
          Sit one spring out.
 
          Nor I, said she,
          But not as you think of reasons.
          For how could I begin at all
          Who will be absent in the spring,
          Expert of distraction, wandered at the foundering interval,
          Returning at summer, preparing for an autumn frost,
          I who am lost among the seasons.
 
          The dumb, cold clouds,
          Climb marble on marble
          Trimming their splendid absence.
 
          If we could remember not how the hero pranced
          But in which compass point he stood and flashed.
 
          No hold, she said,
          In a holocaust of pride.
 
          By flash and patch and pearl,
          The twitching forward of a damaged revelation.
 
It seems that the two people in the poem feel the need for some great spiritual step, but see no way to take it: the revelation can only “twitch forward.” Furlong is virtually unknown, but her work fills many pages in Hart’s compilation of standout lines and passages.
 
Years of eclipse
 
The 1958 Poetry feature included Rosalie Moore’s essay “The Beat and the Unbeat.” An appreciation of Jeanne McGahey’s “Refusal for Heaven,” it also took notice of a new force in poetry.  In the Activists’ home region, the transplanted New York Beats had fused with local tendencies in what was called “the San Francisco Renaissance.” Since the 1956 publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the phenomenon had captured national attention. Hart found himself and his colleagues unwelcome in the new constellation. He also saw little merit in the trumpeted works, finding in them pure laziness or at best a recycling of old Surrealist ideas.

As the movement nonetheless gained ground, Hart sought to set a backfire. In June 1959, he wrote to San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer William Hogan with a call for “a movement to recredit poetry in San Francisco after the Beat Generation fever.” Hogan sent the letter for comment to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s publisher; Ferlinghetti returned it with mocking annotations in a Dada vein. Jeanne McGahey, in turn, wrote a satirical poem directed at Ferlinghetti. Hogan printed parts of this exchange, but there was little sequel.[33]

Hart soon realized that he was facing not a regional but a national change of mood. A reaction against Modernist demands and practices, building for some time, had taken hold on both coasts (Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air” appeared at almost the same moment as “Howl”) and at other centers like Black Mountain College. Once begun, the change of climate was astonishingly rapid. When Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry appeared in 1960, collecting “215 poems culled from the most authentic and interesting poetic voices to emerge in the past fifteen years,” the Activists were conspicuous by their absence.[34] Though Moore and McGahey continued to appear in Poetry through the mid-1960s, as if by sheer momentum, the avenues to recognition were closing one by one.
 
Working in obscurity
 
If producing limited smoke, the Activist flame continued to burn. Hart’s seminars continued, and so, for a long time, did the adult education classes that continually brought in new students in the market for concentrated work. Even after these feeder classes ended, poets managed to find their way to what were now called the Lawrence Hart Seminars, working there, in some cases, for many years.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of the several poets to emerge in this “post-Activist” period was Fred Ostrander, who began working with Hart in 1951. After a particularly long immersion in Sensory Reporting, he suddenly moved to a wild, Whitmanesque style. His mature method, he once remarked, was “to shut myself in a room and go crazy.” Ostrander combines a Surrealist’s imaginative reach with a Buddhist’s compassion for the suffering world: an empathy that extends even to the marginal figures in legends, like the drowning multitudes in a painting of the Flood.
 
          THE DELUGE[35]
 
          In the museums I return to that massive, dark, over-framed painting of the biblical flood
          that howls across the rooms, a wind, a demolition--
          it is a fury, like a prophet, a loud half-idiot jeremiad, a damnation of souls--
          like that at the streetcorner, finger pointed as in the poster--
          it is the verb left out of the language.
 
          Souls—that cling with small hands, with fingers, to badly painted rocks,
          beneath the terrible God speaking with repeated brilliance out of the sky--
          or they float, mere swimmers, with ineffective strokes in the chaos of lifting or utterly
                       disintegrating waves--
          or floating among the chains--
          souls staring with round eyes out of the comical deluge, calling to rescuers
          (and will
          until the paint crumbles upon the canvas)--
          to rescuers who themselves, small swimmers, have been pulled into the vast, insatiate,
                      twisting spiral of the sea.
 
          Together with masts, spars, all, the handpainted half-clothed smiling figurehead,
          he little rodents,
          and the great vanquished statue of Bel,
          the emaciated carriers of the stones,
          the particular colors of fallen gardens,
          the terrified horses of Babylon (detail of an eye reflecting light),
          and the armies unable to swim, helplessly lifted upon the flood . . .
 
          On the right, and distant upon the waves, and growing smaller,
          Noah floats with his animals.
 
          This dark, overpopulated deluge.
 
          Punishment. Beneath the lightning and the electricities, one erratic bird.
 
          It is a painting without a miracle.
 
          There is little sky.
 
Reappearances
 
In the decades since the advent of Post-Modernism, the Activists have made themselves heard from time to time—often with the aid of well-situated individuals who had been exposed to Hart’s ideas and retained an interest in them. In 1968, Robert Brotherson, who had studied with Hart in the 1950s, co-founded an ambitious New York journal called Works; it featured Activists Marie Graybeal, John Hart, Leonard Horwitz, Lois Moyles, Fred Ostrander, and Laurel Trivelpiece. Brotherson went on to co-found the publishing house Woolmer-Brotherson, which published McGahey’s belated first collection, Oregon Winter, along with volumes by Moore, Moyles, Ostrander, and Trivelpiece.[36] Paul Zimmer, another former Hart student, picked John Hart, the present writer, for the Pitt Poetry Series (The Climbers 1978). In 1983-85, Hart and Co. received a series of grants from the San Francisco Foundation to publish a newsletter of literary debate, the poetry LETTER; this elicited a number of late theoretical statements by Hart and McGahey.

The most notable of these later exposures was McGahey’s Homecoming with Reflections, essentially a Collected. It was published in 1989, to excellent reviews, by Theodore Weiss at Princeton in the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series. “Within the last two years,” McGahey wrote about this time, “I have somehow stumbled upon a new (to me) way of using poetic language: simpler and more direct than my earlier styles, but still (I think) firmly within the realm of poetry.”[37] An example, she felt, was the following poem.
 
          CONFESSION[38]
 
          Being of many years, sound mind, I write this;
          And about that planet crippled at the pole
          Having the one bright side.
 
          To you, my heirs, who do not know my name
          (Those memories like some small windy flying thing
          That briefly I still own) I write:
          I love this place.
 
          Not perfect, no.  No Eden
          Where lion and lamb
          (Therefore no longer lion, not quite lamb)
          Lie down togther.
          A flawed place.  Weather uncertain.  Rules all wrong.
          That anything lives (if it lives)
          Only by something dying.  (And the godly don't forgive.)
 
          So tell me that always, always, in the canebrake
          The tiger moves his rails,
          And the deer comes into the clearing
          Like a lifted arm.
 
          Or tell me they've proved it now, the wise men,
          Peering into the smallest for what's littler still,
          Or sorting out among the planets where the billions never end,
          We don't exist.  There's no such stuff as stuff.
          There's only motion.  Big Bang.  From nothing, or a Word.
          A vast obedience.
          In the beginning was a Word, and the Word was God
          (Though the godly don't approve.)
 
          But whoever dreamed up birds, those little handful things?
          Or the caterpillar nudging along my wristbone's scar
          His separate engines?
 
          The willow branch corrects with green
          its yards of swinging air.
          In a circle of small-voiced dogs
          A sun is rising.  Tall, two-footed,
          Endlessly bewildered, we walk about
          Hunting clichés for the beautiful.
 
          I love this place.
 
The recent effort
 
As Lawrence Hart’s health declined in the 1980s, I took over an increasing fraction of the teaching in the seminars. Since his death (in 1996), I have largely stuck to his basic lesson plan: starting new students, even fairly accomplished ones, with Sensory Reporting; continuing with Double Imagery and Poetic Statement; and only then beginning to engage with whole poems. (In my day job as a non-fiction writer, I have come to appreciate how fundamental the three initial techniques are to any good writing.)  I chose at first to deemphasize the Activist label, for several reasons—it seemed nostalgic and hard to explain; it emphasized groupiness in an era no longer enamored of groups; and it raised questions of who should and should not be considered an Activist (who decides?). I preferred the terminology of students, former students, colleagues.

Yet the “Activist” term had an undeniable historical weight, and around 2010 several poets who were working along these lines proposed that we begin flying the old flag again.

Since Fred Ostrander’s death in 2017, six poets regard themselves as Activists. They are Jon Miller, Patricia Nelson, Estelle Solomon, Bonnie Thomas, Judith Yamamoto, and myself. Four of these are no longer working with me directly, but pursue recognizably Activist approaches. Between 2012 and 2017, a Bay Area press, Sugartown Publishing, brought out collections by Nelson, Thomas, Yamamoto, and me, together with an Ostrander New & Collected. These volumes together constitute a short bookshelf of 21st-century Activism.[39]

Jon Miller first encountered Lawrence Hart’s methods in a children’s class and returned as an adult, working in the seminars for 20 years before embarking on a career as an international aid worker. The following poem was written when a job posting brought him briefly back to San Francisco.
 
          ANGELS ABOVE THE CITY[40]
 
                        “An earsplitting Fleet Week air show that is sure to wow spectators and
                          rattle some nerves.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
          We arrayed ourselves, insensible as dolls,
          A vertigo of yearning to appease, applaud, surrender
          To the blue, condoning angels.
          And the clouds fell away at their approach,
          A geometry so furious that the loose sky bent in its procession.
 
          Nor could we break formation, nor carry on in thoughtful self-preservation,
          And the children drew secret breath,
          As fish through fitted gill,
          And the prayer at our throats caught
          Like a dark, discerning vine.
          And the old guard keen in memory of victory and maimings past,
          And the good citizen, erect, his feet inserted to the proper hour of his shoes.
 
          They assayed us all from that unearthly height,
          Like a rake among ashes,
          Friends or friendless target in their implacable sight,
          And declared the astonishing ease
          By which our muscles may cease their successful collaboration.
 
          For death is indifferent,
          A caprice to which we tailor the customs of survival:
          The axe, the shield, our guilt.
          O let the angels forego their merciful promise of return
          To reprove, reprieve, or
          If received, that colder and higher commandment,
          Bring this city to a waterless end.
 
Patricia Nelson also attended Hart’s children’s classes and picked up the thread as an adult, working in the seminar from 1988 to 2018. Her work has followed the imagistic path, emerging on the far side of those struggles for control that Lawrence Hart described in Ideas of Order. Besides her book with Sugartown Publishing (Among the Shapes That Fold and Fly), she has two more with Poetic Matrix Press.[41] Her recent poem “Lancelot” appears in the venerable West Coast magazine Blue Unicorn and in her latest book, Out of the Underworld.
 
          LANCELOT[42]
 
          Beauty pulled me with its calm.
          It came over me like morning,
          a sky full of time and clarity
          and cold as a lake.
 
          I fell most fiercely there,
          into her vast and tranquil air.  How steeply
          I blundered into my vacant soul,
          both grateful and unaware of falling.
 
          Thoughts arrived that shook the path,
          the way I had come, the prayer of the story.
          Words began to bang like large animals,
          striped and splotched, inarticulate.
 
          And suddenly the love was out,
          beyond the broken fence.
          A running of weights and odors
          that knew their way (but not all of it).
 
          That air darkened suddenly,
          like a canyon, when the lines fell.
          When others came with their claims,
          watchers glimmering in waves around us.
 
          They come to gloss the story
          as it ricochets, to disprove the wild colors
          loosened and crowing like parrots.
          To sing to me of distance—age or ripeness.
 
          I saw, as I lost, the thing with height, taller
          than the eye goes with its small blue,
          its judging and rescuing,
          into the place where all is visible.
 
Estelle Solomon is the first poet so far mentioned not to have known Lawrence Hart. She seems to have unusual access to the kind of unconscious content sought by the Surrealists; as Fred Ostrander did, she often edits shorter poems out of much longer masses of almost dictated material. Like Jon Miller, she has not yet published a book.
 
          WORDS[43]
 
          We come bent and stalking, secrets
          adrift and the eyes’ arrows directed.
          As in dreams,
 
          We move without argument,
          in rooms, in shadows, our voices
          catching spark, struck for fire or light.
 
          Words, resinous, mute the willing throat,
          linger on the tongue, almost waste,
          words, in their thrust to rise, like a bird
 
          Beating its crucial wings,
          to rise, rise against gravity's thunder,
          the shimmering, strutting gleam of them!
 
Bonnie Thomas is also a (relatively) newer participant. Also an artist and a designer, this poet cheerfully shrugs off the criticism of “obscurity” as she builds the effects she wants:
 
          THE STEEP OF MIDNIGHT[44]
 
          The angels, my opponents, in line on the ridge,
          the stance lifting from the bones that lie,
          the mask shifting in sleep.
 
          Captive in theater’s pitch the gavel and fist,
          tight to the thigh or raised against air,
          glancing against the stone.
 
          This, the array of selves:
          the dissident, plaintiff, the ankle-welded slave;
          the back, hunched in anger
          or the salt-pools of birthing and need.
          I, the innocent, fail dominion over all,
          lie in greatest undress.
 
          Held in courts and the halls,
          the abundant waters, low grasslands of childhood
          ring out, call at the edge.
          I must wake, descend the coordinates,
          reach the beatitudes, behind the soundless wall,
          the vast absence of birds.
 
Judith Yamamoto worked with Lawrence and then me in several widely separated periods. More than some other Activists, she has managed a conversational voice that constantly side-slips into poetic complexity.
 
          TIME THE PART THAT IS ALL AROUND[45]
 
          You may say that the ocean is in the shape of a mountain,
          where the sky comes to an end. Flatness and illusion. A woman
          turns her back on it, time the part that is all around.
 
          The big boat comes into the harbor, flags at half-mast. Glitter behind it
          and a long way out.
 
          Two small boats fly no flag. I remember that I love you. Glitter and loss,
          looking into the water and eating a sandwich. You telling me
          you are going to die,
          while the big boat backs away from the dock.
 
          Comes in a second time. Time the part that is all around,
          and no, I will not believe it. Comes back to the dock.
          Certainty in the small things only, the feverfew
          on the mountain, the barbs of light on water.
          How that light has no end.
 
Finally, I must cite myself as a veteran student of Lawrence Hart (first exposed to my father’s methods about age 8). During my high school and college years I traversed the usual apprenticeship. Then I took a turn that was surprising even to me, toward, if not all the way back into, meter and rhyme. My father supported this tendency, devising exercises to ward off doggerel and in general to increase my awareness of how words sound together. At about the same time I took up the sport of mountaineering and found imagery from that world flowing, willy-nilly, into my verse, even into poems on quite other subjects.
 
          THE SKEPTICAL CLIMBER AWAITS RESCUE[46]
 
          Our messenger departed days ago
          Seeking that rumored country far below
          Where water is a liquid; where there are things called trees
          To boost their rich and vulnerable leaves:
          Where you can talk into the wind and walk
          The streets at noon with an unshielded eye.
 
          I have my doubts: it seems to me
          That what we know is the reality:
          This wind and whiteness, stonefall, the genuine sun
          The high hostilities to be depended on
          The forecast all of storm.
 
          It’s true than when the clouds out west permit
          You can just make out some humps of darker hue
          And points of brightness that might not be snow.
          The apparition is quite distant, though,
          And who can read this monumental sky?
 
          There was a map
          That had “Seattle” on it, words like that,
          But the universe it showed was too elaborate
          And level to be quite acceptable.
          I smell a hoax. The world is not flat.
 
          The beauty stands around us, hopelessly,
          And we will not survive this injury.
          When we’ve used up our rations, we will die.
          God fashioned food and fuel for six days
          And rested on the seventh; so will we.
 
          This hill of ours with its steam of stars:
          This is the spring of clear water where, to drink,
          The avalanches and the heavy angels come,
          Leading their tall blank horses with dim eyes.
 
What, today, is an Activist poet? In the narrow sense, it is a writer who has worked with Lawrence Hart or, more recently, with me, and who seeks to write a poetry that exhibits its intensity and difference from prose in almost every line. In a broader sense, the label might be extended to any poet who seems to be acting on that basis. Obviously many writers who had nothing to do with Lawrence Hart produce work with the kind of density he sought. Doing so requires resisting one strong current of our day, the demand for quick accessibility and the corresponding scorn of “obscurity” or mannerism. The distinctiveness of the Activists, in the narrow sense, is not that they fight this current but that they try to fight it all the time.

In recent decades, the Activists have found themselves dismissed as conservative, a reversal that induces vertigo. It’s true that we have not gone in for the kinds of experiments pursued by the French Oulipo writers or by some of the Language poets, because these seem to produce results of interest on the intellectual side of the mind only. (It is possible to produce a poem by stochastic means or without a certain vowel, but unless this results in memorable language, why bother?) You will rarely see us scattering words across the page, “typewriter gymnastics” that seems to impede, not help, reception. We have felt some kinship with the Neoformalists and their successors, simply because poets on this track were aiming for esthetic effect and pursuing a species of rigor. Whatever the style, it is just good to see the poetic labor being done.

In the end I myself circle back to two very venerable guides indeed: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lawrence Hart did not cite them, feeling perhaps that their precepts were too obvious to require mention. Truisms. They are not truisms today.

Wordsworth was half-right: “The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a Human Being . . . .”[47] But this thought is treacherous without the completion that Coleridge gave it: “As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry; —secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.”[48]
 


[1] The Civil War and Frontier reminiscences of John Benton Hart, Lawrence’s grandfather, were published in 2019 by the University of Oklahoma Press (John Hart, ed.: Bluecoat & Pioneer: The Recollections of John Benton Hart, 1864-1868).
 
[2] “The Federal Emergency Relief Administration,” at www.lib.washington.edu, consulted October 30, 2019.

[3] Clive James, “A Stretch of Verse,” Poetry November 2012.

[4] “Dedication,” lead-off poem in Moore, The Grasshopper’s Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).

[5] Lawrence Hart, “About the Activist Poets,” Poetry 78, no. 2 (May 1951), 101.

[6] “To Earthward.”

[7] First published in Five Young American Poets 1941 (Norfolk, Conn. New Directions, 1941), 86.
 
[8] Paul Reverdy, “L’Image,” in Le Gant de Crin (Paris: Plon, 1926), 32-35; translation by John Hart.

[9] Edith Sitwell, “Winter,” in Bucolic Comedies.

[10] Federico García Lorca, “Ode to the King of Harlem,” translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili.

[11] Moore, The Grasshopper’s Man and Other Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 55.

[12] Inferno 2, 67-73, translated by John Aitken Carlyle.

[13] W. H. Auden, “Venus Will Now Say a Few Words,” Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1946), 110.

[14] Frederick Prokosch, “The Victims,” Poetry November 1940, 121.

[15] Auden, “At the Grave of Henry James,” Collected Poems, 126.

[16] A Beginning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 71.
 
[17] See “A Letter to Harriet Monroe,” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane (Anchor, 1966). In The Yale Younger Poets Anthology of 1998, George Bradley wrote of Hart: “He believed in a poetry of fierce concentration, and his model was Hart Crane” (lxiii). The first half of this statement is correct, but it’s difficult to imagine where Bradley derived the second half.

[18] First published in Pacific Spectator, vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring 1949).

[19] “Couriers to García” refers to a once ubiquitous piece of inspirational literature, an 1899 essay by Elbert Hubbard called “Message to García.” In this parable about determination, an American officer gets crucial information to an allied Cuban leader in the Spanish-American War. In this poem, of course, the message does not get through.

[20] Jeanne McGahey, “The Shadow Meanings,” Poetry Letter 13 (January-February 1985), 1-2.

[21]. Peter L. Sharkey, ed. Learned and Leaved: A Tribute to Rosalie Moore (San Rafael, CA: Marin Poetry Center, 1986), 98.

[22] George Bradley’s account of the Activists in The Yale Younger Poets Anthology is confused about chronology, stating: “The group . . . was made up primarily of Hart’s wife, Jeanne McGahey, their son John, Rosalie Moore (related to McGahey by marriage), and Robert Horan.” Horan had departed by the time of the marriages, and “son John,” the present author, was born in 1948. Page lxiii.

[23] First published in Barlow, View from a Hill (Mexico City, 1947), 15-16.

[24] First published in Poems for a Competition (Sacramento, CA: The Fugitive Press, 1942), 11.
 
[25] McGahey at this time was deep into Sensory Reporting, and her poems of that era derive much of their force from this single technique. Alas, this resource was not enough to rescue the title piece, a short drama that Laughlin admired but McGahey herself did not. The author quite agreed with Louise Bogan’s tart review: “Jeanne McGahey should not have written this play.”

[26] Lawrence Hart et al., “Ideas of Order in Experimental Poetry,” Circle 6 (1945), 1-30.

[27] Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (New York: The Noonday Press, 1922), 1.

[28] See for instance Primitivism and Decadence (New York: Arrow Editions, 1937), 16: A good poem “rests on a formulable logic, however simple; that is, the theme can be paraphrased in general terms. Such a paraphrase, of course, is not the equivalent of a poem: a poem is more than its paraphrasable content. But . . . many poems cannot be paraphrased and are therefore defective.”

[29] Lawrence Hart/Jeanne McGahey Archive, at the home of John Hart, San Rafael, California.

[30] Lawrence Hart, “About the Activist Poets,” Poetry 78, no. 2 (May 1951), 101. The Activists always kept a certain reserve in assessing one another, in contrast to, for example, the practice of the Beats. Allen Ginsberg wrote: “ It’s really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you’re selling is not just your writing but your personal friends.” Edmund White. “The Beats: Pictures of a Legend,” New York Review of Books August 19, 2010, 80.

[31] William Carlos Williams, “Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems,” Poetry 78, no. 6 (September 1951), 349.
 
[32] First published in The Poetry Letter 13 (San Rafael, CA: The Lawrence Hart Institute, January-February 1985), 6.

[33] “Between the Lines with William Hogan,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 1959.

[34] Donald M. Allen, ed., The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), jacket copy.

[35] Fred Ostrander, Petroglyphs (Blue Light Press, 2009), 84-85

[36]Lois Moyles, I Prophesy Survivors, 1971; Jeanne McGahey, Oregon Winter, 1973; Rosalie Moore, Year of the Children, 1977; Fred Ostrander, The Hunchback and the Swan, 1978; Laurel Trivelpiece, Legless in Flight, 1978; Lois Moyles, Alleluia Chorus, 1979; Rosalie Moore, Of Singles and Doubles, 1979.

[37] Jeanne McGahey, Guggenheim application, 1991.

[38] Jeanne McGahey, Homecoming with Reflections (Princeton: Quarterly Review of Literature, 1989), 67-68.

[39] Patricia Nelson, Among the Shapes that Fold and Fly, 2012; Fred Ostrander, It Lasts a Moment, 2013: Judith Yamamoto, At My Table, 2014; Bonnie Thomas, Sun on the Rind, 2015; John Hart, Storm Camp, 2017.

[40] First published in Seventh Quarry 22 (Summer/Autumn 2015): 47-48. Seventh Quarry is published in Wales.

[41] Spokes of Dream or Bird, 2017; Out of the Underworld, 2019.

[42] First published in Blue Unicorn 43, no. 1 (Fall 2019), 39.

[43] First published in Blue Unicorn 42, no. 2 (Spring 2019), 31.

[44] Published here fore the first time.

[45] First published in At My Table, titled “Flags at Half Mast”

[46] The Midwest Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 271.

[47] “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads,” in Stephen Gill, ed., William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 1984, 605.

[48] Biographia Literaria, Chapter 1.