The Rigor of His Refusals:
The Poetry of Ross Feld

Plum Poems. Ross Feld. New York: The Jargon Society, 1972; Winter Poems. Ross Feld. New York: Shortstop Press, 1967 (both out of print).

     Ross Feld, the poet, novelist, and essayist, died a few years ago at the age of 53.  He had overcome cancer as a young man, but there was a recurrence in middle age, and the chemotherapy that killed the cancer destroyed his immune system, so that in the end he died of pneumonia.  (His novel about cancer, Only Shorter, is a beautiful book.)  The last time I saw Ross, around a year before his death (this was in Cincinnati, where he and his family, having moved from Brooklyn, lived during the last fifteen or so years of his life), he was very cheerful and as full of intellectual vitality and vibrancy as ever; but he knew that he didn’t have long to live, and he intimated as much.  I had known Ross for more than thirty years, since the time we were undergraduates at C.C.N.Y. and involved with the literary magazine Promethean.  Ross was the fiercest literary intellectual I have ever known, and one of the most refined.  At the age of 19 he knew more about poetry than any of his professors, not only because he knew it from the inside and struggled with it every day, but because he was someone for whom aesthetics and ethics were one and the same thing.  He presided over our literary meetings like a Dr. Johnson, and though I frequently disagreed with him, I think I learned more about the art of poetry from Ross than I have ever learned from anyone else, before or since.  After his junior year he quit school, essentially because he didn’t like the idea of being a student or taking a degree or compromising with the world in any of the usual ways.  He was a writer, pure and simple; he had a distaste for academia (including "academic poetry" and the whole "workshop" mentality that has since taken over); and he felt ready to enter the world, so staying in school merely to collect a degree seemed like cowardice to him.  Valéry says somewhere that nothing marks a poet so much as the rigorousness of his refusals.  Ross’s standards were sometimes impossibly high.
     Around the time Ross left school, or a few years later, he gave up poetry.  The two acts of refusal must have been connected, although I don’t ever recall him saying so.  Poetry had been his life, and he was essentially a lyric poet, a poet of subjective feeling; yet at the same time, there was a modesty in him that insisted on the "prosaic" aspect of things, so that anything that smacked of being "poetic" (a word he associated with narcissism, false idealizations, and sentimentality) he distrusted profoundly.  Nobody knows why Rimbaud gave up poetry, but there is a kind of romanticism so intense that eventually it has to turn against itself in revulsion, and this is often the case when the artist in question is especially precocious, as Ross certainly was.  In the end, the contradictions inherent in his position may have seemed unresolvable.  In any event, Ross gave up poetry for prose?for novels and essays; he gave up what he considered a monological art for a dialogical one, and in order to immerse himself in the "prosaic," both because he distrusted his own desire as a poet to stand alone and above the world and because he needed other voices to mitigate the "essential solitude" he experienced as a lyric artist.  His novels, steeped in the ordinary as they are, shine with a soft radiance, and his essays flow with the rapidity of unconventional insight that characterized his conversation.  Some of Ross’s literary essays (the ones on Montale and Jack Spicer, for instance, which were published in Parnassus) are as fine as any I have read by a contemporary writer.  But knowing his poetry as I do, I often feel in his novels and essays the presence of the poet; and after Plum Poems, the collection that he brought out with Jargon Press in 1972 (thirty years ago now), Ross published no more poetry.  He sometimes referred to himself as a "recovering poet," but occasionally he intimated that he hadn’t fully recovered, and I’d love to know what he left behind in his drawer.

     Even as an artifact, in the physical aspect of its presentation, Plum Poems conveys a  message that testifies to the dilemma of the artist in what a Marxist (though Ross certainly was none) would call late-Capitalist American society.  The book is tiny (4" x 6 "); it has no table of contents; its forty-odd poems are unpaginated; and the type-face that has been used is correspondingly small.  On the front and back covers there are austerely abstract color drawings by the artist Dan Rice (the one on the front cover is particularly spare).  In its physical form, therefore, the book echoes the refusal?a refusal that the poems themselves assert on every page?to participate in media hype or self-aggrandizement of any kind.  It soon becomes apparent, however, that this almost hermetic refusal of the values of the marketplace coincides with a poetic ambition that goes far beyond anything that the marketplace could possibly have to offer.
     Ross came out of a school of American modernism that embraced a minimalist aesthetic and would have disdained symbolism in any of its traditional forms; but the collection is obviously built around the central symbol of the plum, and one might as well begin from this point of departure.  The plum is an object of desire, clearly, but it is also the subject of desire, the desiring "heart" (a word that occurs almost as frequently in these poems as the plum).  It is the "fruit of desire," but, as such, is at once immanent and transcendent: immanent because it is situated in the world ("the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all," as Wordsworth said in The Prelude), but transcendent (and hence tantamount to "forbidden fruit") because, at the same time, if desire can be satisfied by the things of the world, those things are no longer worthy of desire.  This is the lyrical dilemma around which these poems orbit, and against which they struggle.  They struggle to resolve the dilemma both within its own terms and, sometimes, by seeking to eliminate it altogether?which is something, of course, they cannot do.  Only in the poem do immanence and transcendence fleetingly come together, and so the poem is in some sense the supreme object of desire and the one most fully adequate to the symbol.  "The plum // is a nocturnal creation. It is specific / in its own shadow" ("A Lesson for Physics").  "‘[O]nly the poem’ / he said and he must have been weeping / as he said it" ("Yes, Mrs. Williams").
     On the thematic level, the dilemma has to do with desire and with the problem of establishing the proper forms and limits to desire, so that one can live in the world; but on the linguistic or meta-poetic level (and the two levels mirror each other), it has to do with the nature of symbolization or of literary language in general.  Although the plum is the central symbol of this collection, the collection’s didactic voice, which can frequently be heard articulating and gathering together a poetics, not only abjures symbolism but even metaphor.  "No putty, no met-a-phor," the poet sings bravely: "I don’t believe that the crow / sings innuendo or the thunder / claps a ploy" ("Three").  As we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, the attempt to jettison literary language was a lost cause, both because it meant that the poem was essentially turned against itself and because there is no Occam’s Razor able to slice away the literary from the non-literary uses of language.  We have to remember, however, that at the time these poems were written, the desire for the "thing in itself" (in poetry, associated with Williams and then with the Objectivists;  in philosophy, with Logical Positivism and empiricism in general) had not yet come to seem impossible.  There is thus a sense in which poetry is pitted against itself in these poems; but the dilemma is often an enabling one, and they have that within them which makes them sing.  This is the collection of a very young man, but the poet who composed it had developed with extraordinary rapidity, and although the book contains some dead-ends, it has a number of poems that are stunningly beautiful and of real significance.

     One of my two favorites in the volume (I’ll reserve the second for the end) is entitled "For L.M.."  (Think of what it means to entitle a poem "For L.M."  Something in that gesture is typical of Ross, though also very much of its time.  I would characterize it as making public not a communication that is essentially private but the fact that it is essentially private, so that what is made public, in the sphere of poetic communication, is both this fact and the complex relationship that the poem is negotiating between the private and the public.)  I quote the poem in its entirety, as I will try to do in the majority of cases, because of the difficulty now of obtaining the volume:

 One hair on the pillow marks
 off the world. Returns me to options
 I think will be the same. A
 feeling of uselessness

 when I chuck memories into the
 future. That I am chocolate in the sun
 of some bright arrangement, made thick

 in someone’s heated mind,
 her possibilities.

 I don’t learn from my own poems.

 To take the plum in one hand
 and with the other wave myself

 thru, forgetting the
 orchards, that dazzling
 in the warm light.

 An old friend knows
 enough to get off the
 train when it can’t make
 the next stop.

     The quality of the lyricism in "For L.M." depends on the clarity and precision of the poem’s  imagery and phrasing, both of which are so finely honed that criticism seems restricted either to pointing or to paraphrase.  I have just been discussing Ross’s strictures against symbolism, but in "For L.M." it really is the imagery rather than metaphor or symbolism that carries the poem.  By this I mean that the hair on the pillow that "marks off the world" could only have been arrived at through an actual experience, and this fidelity to experience, one might say, defines a whole school of poetry at its best.  But what makes the imagery come alive is the way in which it is implicated in an utterly tragic vision of eros.  In the vision of this terribly sad poem, singularity or difference is immediately swallowed up by sameness; and so it becomes possible to imagine oneself in a number of different futures having the same kind of memories of the past?and possible also to imagine onself as the object of someone else’s similar memories and ruminations.  "A feeling of uselessness" indeed, and terrifying to us all, but especially, of course, to the poet, because the uniqueness of the individual is blurred and subsumed in the generic sameness of the species.  There is something thrilling to me?terribly sad but also very funny
?about the lines, "To take the plum in one hand / and with the other wave myself / thru. . . ."  The image is of a traffic cop keeping order, but here it is one part of the self that is policing the other part, so as to protect it from its own dreams or fantasies of happiness ("the / orchards, that dazzling / in the warm light").
      "I don’t learn from my own poems," the didactic voice says, and by implication the situation is turned back upon the art of lyric poetry; for paradoxically (as both Dante and Mallarmé knew), what the poet must protect himself from above all is his own dream of happiness.  There is a vein of classicism in Ross’s work (too rare in the poetry of his generation) that is darkly suspicious of its own romanticism.  But the two conflicting tendencies find an equipoise in the poem; and what the poem as a whole is saying, or teaching, goes beyond the askesis urged by its didactic voice.  "For L.M." is deceptively modest and minimalist in its stance, but I continue to find it extraordinarily, even hauntingly, beautiful, one of the important things.  (I’m still not sure, however, even after thirty years, what to make of the poem’s final stanza: sometimes its modesty?the ease of the comparison?seems right, but sometimes too much of a diminution.)
     For reasons that should now be obvious, the prosodic impetus in Plum Poems stems from Williams and the free-verse tradition.  The difficulty inherent in poetry of this kind is that the music has to flow from the phrasing, which needs to be note-perfect and completely sure of itself, but is anchored on nothing but the bare content of what the poem has to say in the abstract (which is to say, until the words have assumed concrete form, nothing).  If "form is the extension of content," as Creeley maintained, then everything depends on the thought and, as Pound said, "the quality of the emotion," on the depth of the experience being rendered and the spontaneity and freshness of the language as it emerges.  This is true of metrical poetry as well, of course, but in the prosi metrum of free verse (as Williams, the Objectivists, and poets such as Ross practiced it), everything emanates from the music of thought.
     The kind of free verse that Ross was struggling to master from his very beginnings as a poet sometimes looks easy, but, in actuality, is exceedingly difficult.  I’d like to illustrate by quoting a very early poem of Ross’s that appeared in a pamphlet entitled Winter Poems, which he published in 1967.  He must have been 18 or 19 when he wrote the poem, and I’m one of perhaps two or three people who have read it carefully; so this is an opportunity to quote something lovely that has been lost entirely.  The poem is entitled "Envy":

 Who is happy, has enough
           money to get along
 easily, drinks coffee
 with joy?

 Who is it?

 An ancient bird is sending
         me its greeting,
 pointing my nose in its
 direction, and
 I am helpless.
 It’s a sad bird too,
 it wants to cry, a
 weakness is searching thru its
 body.

 It’s been night for a couple of
 hours now,        there is no change
 in the dark street that I
 can see from the window.   I
 go downstairs,   the bird has
 been standing out
           there for hours.       We talk.

 I am helpless.

     The opening stanza is deceptively simple.  The question it poses is charmingly naive, but what is interesting to me is that for a poem of this kind, lacking the protection of traditional prosody, something this simple would seem to be off-limits to what can be articulated.  We’re in the open here, and since nothing seems to separate the language of the poem from the language of ordinary communication, the question is what makes this stanza poetically possible.  What makes it possible is what follows: the figure of the ancient bird of envy, a quite complex figure, really, which dominates the remainder of the poem.  Free verse poses difficulties that traditional poetry does not, but it also allows for a special kind of accomplishment, and that can be seen here.
     In "Technical Drawing" (I am returning to Plum Poems), an interesting but not, I think, great poem, we see why meter and what Ross in conversation used to call the "old, aulic language" of poetry ("aulic," meaning "courtly," was one of his favorite words) are no longer available to him, no longer accessible or believed in, and why, moreover, the struggle is for a language and an artistic consciousness that remain spontaneous and do not succumb to narcissistic self-regard:

 It’s different than invention, burdocks
 pulled off alone, let’s say alone.

 I can’t take my own comparisons
 nor make active the dumb rust machines
                that are leased within.

 Call it what you like but what rhymes
 with peach is reach, teach,
 beseech, all in a chorus of some positive
 drawl, getting there.

 Or with cherry? merry, berry, ferry
 into some days you can’t get enough of.

 But my invention. Not the novel of
 insects. Plum with
 dumb, come, some rum
 soaked half-life burning

 and sighing in a small wind.
 Inadequate. My song sung. And just
 too much for invention, phased

 out, obsolete, parsed.

This is a poem about refusing to accept the formalisms that make poetry a virtuoso performance; but in making this refusal, the poem itself becomes a virtuoso performance, and so is caught in a double bind.  The comparison to "burdocks" (i.e., plants with burrs) "pulled off alone," suggesting that poetic composition is less a matter of invention than of removing an irritation that sticks to one’s skin, is apt and amusing, but the phrase "let’s say alone" is serious and subtly expresses the hermetic side to Ross’s poetic character.  I assume what he means is (a) that in actuality it is not merely the self that is making the poem but something speaking through the self, and (b) that nevertheless it would be immodest to say so.
     The intelligence of these poems is always in evidence, but they are in fact most compelling when something does speak (or break) through them spontaneously, prohibiting them from falling into narcissistic self-regard.  "A Plum for Edward Dahlberg" develops slowly, and is dulled at first by the meticulousness with which it builds up detail, but something passionate (and very typical of Ross) breaks through in the middle of the poem and carries it to the end:

 There they are. On the table. Bonnard
 spent a lot of time watching women get
 in and out of bathtubs for just
 this. An intimate color

 bathing in itself. Even in the A.&P., they
 dazzle you. A motherlode for lookers.

 But you cannot pick them up and
 try to take a bite. That’s an old
 story. For they are salted

 and they have kept some sort of
                      faith. Some men have things

 gnawing at them as well. I ask you to
 throw the fruit into the water and
 watch it sink. Ask you to

 think of the men who have
 booked passage on it.

What I find most thrilling in this poem is the inspired nonsense about the plums having "kept some sort of faith."  With what?  With something that cannot be articulated, evidently, and so the reader has to fill in the blanks (except that he can’t).
     Should we say that these are poems of religious desire?  The fact that they seem to have an Augustinian streak (rather odd for a Brooklyn Jew) is corroborated by the "biographical note" that Ross supplied on the back cover: "I was born at Thagaste in Algeria in 354 A.D., became a Manichean, got shook, became the Bishop of Hippo, and wrote funny books ever after about cities.  My friends call me ‘Augie’ because I’m such a regular guy."  In any event, it was never simply a matter of invention, of wanting to express or write something out of the "self."  (Ross used to quote Jack Spicer’s line about "the big lie of the personal.") He would have been embarrassed to hear it said, but I think Ross was among the chosen, and I think that on some level he himself knew this (though at the same time the idea of "being chosen" would have seemed impossibly romantic, or "poetic" to him).  He intimates something of all this in "A Dark Plum":

 A silence which settles the night
 unsettles me.
 It is not the absence of the yellow
 in one’s bright eyes but

 a slight cooling in the head, sealing
 love to the sharp darkness.
 Out of that black, my name comes sailing
 in at me, chiffon and in

 someone else’s voice, a
 soft pin put to me directly. "Ross"
 it says off the night. The voice says "Ross"
 like Hamlet’s father. It falls from
 any cliff.

 At night you learn that you can’t talk
 to yourself but only to Hamlet,
 to his father, to a cliff.

This is not a narcissistic poem, however it might seem to be.  It persuades me that the poet’s name has not been spoken in vain, but has been summoned by a voice (call it the poem itself) that has the weight of authority.  By what am I persuaded?  By the poem itself: by its language and prosody.
     I conclude by quoting "Reveille," my other favorite poem in the book.  This is a poem that  never ceases to amaze and inspire me:
 The heart is too easily awakened by things
 like the telephone. It is whipped from
         its own tired science by a

 noise, it sets down the figures of women
 who ran, wild-haired, thru its dream. Women,
 scenting the world with morning,
                 cut grass, damp breasts, an
         odor of plums.
 The heart lay there absolutely
              mute and fascinated

 by these visitors who had something
 to do with happiness but now it

   drops them and they crack. Broken women,
   broken plums. The telephone rings and says,

 "This is the operator,
 Fuck you."

The poem moves from beginning to end with utter precision and certainty.  The statement it makes is as simple as a statement can be. We all have dreams of happiness, it says (we are visited by them), and then life or the world or whatever smashes them.  The last line may look like a mere punch-line, but it has the force of necessity, and somehow it always surprises me.  With the possible exception of the word "absolutely," which I sometimes think has too many syllables for the rhythm (but I wouldn’t know what to substitute for it, in any event), the poem strikes me as perfect.  Bitter as it is, it must have come to the poet as a gift, just as it was; but all the same, in order to give it to us, he had to write it down.