Kenneth Warren - a book is organized as a guidebook that enables the reader to "pursue poetic aspirations and punk protrusions through four records of interactive knowledge: (1) Semiotic Sobriety; (2) Archaic Sexuality; (3) Alchemical Precision; (4) Pharmacological Utopia"

Kenneth Warren, Captain Poetry’s Sucker

Punch: AGuide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–

2012, BlazeVOX [books], 2012.

Called by Andrei Codrescu, “one of the few and great readers of American poetry,” Warren presents in this collection of more than one hundred essays an interactive history of poetic aspirations and punk protrusions. With a mytho-poetic, archetypal way of reading community, music, and poetry, Warren is a provocative exegete of humanity's typological inheritance. From Wrestlemania to the Cosmic Ethiopian King, from The Residents to Simon Weil, Warren has organized his criticism into four sections, including: Semiotic Sobriety, about the manipulations of language, money, music, property, and state power that squeezed the poetic mind into a punkhole dug by Baby Boomers during the Age of Reagan; Archaic Sexuality, analyzing the lunar circuits and somatic-bio rhythms that pulled poets toward chthonic depth; Alchemical Precision, in which he explores an Arcanum of poets ranging from Objectivists to the Western Occult; and Phamacological Utopia, in which he pays tribute to Charles Olson, A Curriculum of the Soul, Jack Clarke, and other poets of intuitive genius. The book covers the best of Cleveland’s underground bands, including Pere Ubu, Home and Garden,, The Floyd Band, and The Mice. The Dead Kennedys, The Residents, and Johnny Thunders are represented as well. There are essays on Beat poets Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, and Ray Bremser. Other poets considered are: Kathy Acker, David Antin, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Robin Blaser, Richard Blevins, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Sharon Doubiago, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Stephen Ellis, Clayton Eshleman, Richard Grossinger, Jack Hirschman, Susan Howe, Lawrence Joseph, Yusef Komunykaa, d.a. levy, Lyn Lifshin, Harold Norse, Ed Sanders, Hugh Seidman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stacy Szymaszek, Tod Thilleman, Anne Waldman, Diane Ward, Lewis Warsh, John Wieners, and many more.

Did you read that ... 467 freakin pages! That’s a lot of text, friend. This is, indeed,what some would call ‘a doorstop’ of a book. Well, indeed it is. Why not, if you need it, use it. It is also a milestone (pardon that pun, jeez), an amazing collection of Warren’s writings, amazing. Who knew. Well now there is no excuse. This book should be on lots of lists….of course it won’t for all the obvious reasons readers of Galatea know all too well. So maybe it shouldn’t be on any list…would just bring us all down for sure. Now to me, a rather simple guy out here, the writing for, the editing, printing, publishing, mailing and whatnot involved with Warren’s delightful publication House Organ would seem to take up all his time. Not so. 467 pages is a lot of text. And here it is. Escaping the Punkhole of the Homeric Captain’s Rabbit Den….so to speak.

Well what do you want to know about the past 20 years of “small press/little mag/small time” poetics in the USA? This is certainly more than just a collection of Kenneth’s publications in the above mentioned HO magazine….you can see from pubs acknowledged i.e. Rolling Stock, Exquisite Corpse, Sulfur et al….where Warren is known or seen (in print). Warren has certainly been a big part of what, for better words, I will call the ‘invisible poetry nation’ which exists within and alongside and under and next too and beneath and between what might be called the ‘big deal’ or ‘academic’ or ‘MFA driven’ or ‘hipster east coast’ poetry scene(s) in the USA today. The point being made here is that, to me, a whole lot of those involved in public poetics these days seem to skip from the days of Ted Kerrigan to the day of C a Conrad without noticing what went in between. (This is based on such data as is available on the Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog.) Here we go.

The book is for the most part broken into two areas ….first -- everthing Charles Olson centric and second -- remarks and reviews of dozens of poet you might not recognize unliess you followed small press writings. No question that Kenneth Warren is writing the most articulate and educated texts concerning Charles Olson of anyone on the planet. I must confess upfront that most of what he does write about Olson is way over my head. However it is must read if you want to read someone able to dive deep into the meta of Olson…the physic, the mystic, the clinical physical, the mental and the magical. Warren is on to it all and can write to keep one interested even if (and here my hand is up waving) one does not or cannot follow all the reference Warren gathers in his explications of Olson’s poetics or magic or whatnot. I would not hesitate to say that Warren on Olson is gonna match the likes of Duncan on HD and Lisa Jarnot on Duncan. This is, then, one of the great critical collection on one of the leading 20th century writers…Charles Olson. Which would make Captain Poetry’s book worth investing in for sure.

The other best reason to spend that cash is to read Warren’s take on a long list of writers who stand out in the last half of 20th and beginning of 21st century here in the USA. And if you will notice that the majority of those included in Warren’s musing are not exactly household names in Williamsburg, NY or Chicago, Ill. Let me list a few names: Stephen Ellis, Tod Thillemam, John Clarke, Ray Bremser, Rochelle Ratner, Sharon Doubiago, Lyn Lifshin, Diane Ward, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Gil Sorrentino are a few of the “outsiders” covered. Others like Eigner, Waldman, Wieners, Eshleman, Dorn, Codrescu, Warsh, Myles, Howe, Wakoski. Antin….are some rather well known poets of mid-century. 

I guess what I am saying is that not many collections of writings in either published anthology’s or other media are going to include such a diverse and un-discussed group of writers. Perloff aint doin it. “Harriet” aint doin it. Bernstein aint doin it. Warren is…did. Here it is. 

Like me, you might not always agree with what Warren has to say or how he says it or who he says it about…but, but I would suggest that you sure as hell will be entertain, amused, educated and enhanced as you read through this book. And just one more thing…it is 467 pages sure and you would think I could find something to quote in this engagement….well I didn’t. Didn’t look for anything. That is just the way it is. Here is what I say. Find the book, read the book. Here we go. -JIM MCCRARY

http://galatearesurrection19.blogspot.com/2012/12/captain-poetrys-sucker-punch-by-kenneth.html

"The whole creation concerned with 'FOUR'"

Ezra Pound, Canto 91 (91/630)

Any reader of Jung would twig to that: mandala, order, cosmos; the center, individuation. Kenneth Warren is much concerned with four. He wrote me once, "When working occulted and tabooed domains, sometimes one must use blinds. The purpose of any critique is to spin from center of the mandala-out/in/up/down toward energetic encounters with each complex." No accident, his collection of thirty years worth of essays and reviews Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012 is divided into four sections. He takes Jung's typology of sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking as cardinal directions-out, in, up, down-- in steering a course through the work of numerous poets and poetries. Specifically, Warren's book is organized as a guidebook that enables the reader to "pursue poetic aspirations and punk protrusions through four records of interactive knowledge: (1) Semiotic Sobriety; (2) Archaic Sexuality; (3) Alchemical Precision; (4) Pharmacological Utopia" (17).

Following Jung, Warren sees poetic work as the work of integration. Our psyches are ships blown from any quarter, but there is a prevailing wind-different poets have different temperaments symbolized by different archetypes. Theorizing his approach using sophisticated revisions of the Jung-inspired Brigg-Myer personality typology, Warren is able to gain deep insight into the perceptions and confusions in contemporary poetry and poets because he believes that "an encounter with souls in the modern imagination becomes the proximate matter for poesis"(448). Poetry that matters comes from the unconscious depths, out of the dark, like the dead. Poetry is soul-making.

Warren is an iconoclastic, slashing writer-the piratical, pugnacious, bunny rabbit on the cover of this exciting book swings a mean cutlass. It figures that he learned his craft reviewing rock 'n roll. He justifies his "cartoonish title" because it evokes "the street punk lineage of bop-bop romanticism and bravado scholarship that Gregory Corso and Charles Olson deposited ay SUNY Buffalo," where Warren studied in the 1970s. For years, Warren has edited and published a simple folded newsletter/ pamphlet called House Organ, home for fugitive poets and many of these essays-a publication of large ideas in small print that is one of the best things going in the many worlds of poetry. Here, he engages a stunning number of poets, many of whom this reviewer has never heard. There are about 150 separate essays altogether, an archive of poetry criticism orbiting more or less around the double-star of Olson and Clayton Eshelman-or put another way, Olson's Buffalo and Eshelman's Sulphur.

To say that Warren is a Jungian is only a partial truth; after "Buffalo" and "Sulphur," say "Eranos"-with its suggestion of a heady mix of archetypal psychology, anthropology, religious studies and magic. Not a psychiatrist, not an academic, Warren is a free intellectual-a librarian by trade-- who has used his Borgesian occupation to read very widely. He has a penchant for forbidden discourses: the first is poetry itself; but beyond that Warren is read-up on magic, the occult, astrology and alchemy, the suave Anglo-American conspiracy that we used to call "the Establishment," secret history. Of the cults and tribes of poetry, he may fairly be called an "Olsonite"; but his teacher and biggest influence is Olson's evangelist, John Clarke. Warren considers Clarke's dense and difficult From Feathers to Iron (1987) a major work of mythopoesis and Clarke himself "perhaps the most important American poet to begin writing since Charles Olson." Warren finds that "Clarke goes further than Olson to fathom the cosmological, experiential, phenomenological and idealist basis of the epic calling in the age of materialist sign play" (432). From Feathers to Iron purports to be a series of lectures, but is really a kind of magic book, an amazing mythopoetic outpouring of esoteric knowledge looking back to Blake, Ovid, the Vedas, Homer and the Indo-European inheritance generally. That is to say, Clarke is conscious of the "Homeric chain" of spiritual-poetic magi leading back through Hermes Trismegistus into the human dawn. How this golden chain got into the "punkhole" is, I suppose, a sign of the times. It may have to do with "sign-play"-more about that later.

Warren likes magic books, among them, besides Clarke's, the work of Olson, Jung's Red Book, Griaule's Conversations with Ogometelli, Duncan's H.D. Book, James Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld, (very important to both Clarke and Eshelman) and John Giannini's Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to a Fuller Life, which is a sophisticated typology in the Jungian mode. On the historical plane, Warren is drawn to Carrol Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. The strange journey of Henry Wallace, agriculturalist, theosophist and politician in search of a New World Order is paradigmatic for Warren. Like Olson, Wallace is a "representative man," navigating the violent contradictions of the 20th century.

The hidden treasure in Captain Poetry is what amounts to a whole critical monograph on Charles Olson (pp. 313-367) via extended readings and meditations on the Ralph Maud edition of Olson's Selected Letters-a work which prompted Warren to write more than twenty trenchant essays (divided into four groups) of about 1000-1500 words each. These are supplemented by other essays on Olson, including reviews of the Olson/ Frances Boldereff correspondence, the Ralph Maud/ Tom Clark biography duel, and a review of the proletarian Gloucester poet Vincent Ferrini, Olson's antithesis. Warren's essays might stand in relation to Olson as Olson's Call Me Ishmael stands in relation to Herman Melville, so long as we understand that Call Me Ishmael is a book of setting out, written at the outset; whereas Warren's is book written in that state of mature consideration one feels in sifting through a father's papers twenty years after. The picture painted of Olson in Warren's Jungian psychoanalysis of his letters is of an anxious, driven character, haunted by his working-class Catholic background, trying early-on to assimilate in to a WASP establishment that was both alien and alluring. Warren's thoughts about them are characteristic; on the historical plane he comments on an Olson letter to Timothy Leary:

...the fruits of Olson's participation in the Harvard Psychedelic project remain evident in the disintegration of his life. Indeed, it is troubling to imagine Olson' attempts at inner alchemy interdicted through Harvard's CIA sponsored psychedelic drug experiments (340).

The keyword here is "disintegration." As a critic, Warren is most concerned with the well-springs of a poet's being, the dark, archetypal sources, the alignments and signs and symbols. On that mytho-poetic level, Warren concludes his monumental consideration thus

In the end, Olson reaps from his time of living in cultural crisis a heap of radical negations. His family structure is disordered. His cash flow is poor. His objectivity is impaired. Selected Letters is testimony that the descending cycle of the Kali Yuga brings Olson to the brink of encounter with Antichrist and Millennium. When, finally, the reader contemplates Olson's Selected Letters in light of both the Holocaust and the traditional view of time, one cannot avoid imagining that it is Kali, dancer on cremation grounds, who dwells in Olson's New World Order of ambiguity, disequilibrium, irresponsibility and sorrow" (367).

On this dark note, let me shift to other evidence of that state of dissolution accompanying the end of a cosmic cycle, what for me is the climax of Captain Poetry, the capture of the most important citadel of the Olsonites, SUNY Buffalo, by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Movement. The Olsonite cadres were thus driven underground-- into the punkhole?-but through the laws of cosmic compensation this defeat prepared the way for the surprising consummation of a new magic book, a collective project called Curriculum of the Soul, (2010) bearing the Olson tradition safely into the 21st century. "Curriculum of the Soul exists within the continuous tradition of Hermeticism, a spiritual path of exotic and free research connected to Hermes, the scribe of the gods and guide of souls in the realm of the dead" - in other words it is an expression of discovery and soulful potential. Proposed by Clarke and carried to a successful conclusion after Clarke's death in 1992 by Albert Glover, it is a remarkable, collaborative forty year effort by a group of poets in the wilderness. There are 50 copies of this precious book in existence-enough perhaps, to survive the dark ages ahead.

Essays in this collection show that Warren was hostile to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement from the very beginning, already seeing in 1984 that it marked the incursion of "Theory" in all of the worst senses of that term into a domain that, in his view, is ultimately concerned with the sacred, a discourse of the soul. French skepticism married to American materialism and self-marketing techniques meant the production of "signs of cultural labor" built by careerist cultural constructs with Titanic agendas: "The Language Movement attacked the descriptive, naturalistic, referential and transcendental mystifications of literature and accentuated in the field of language the linguistic contradictions of commodity culture" (422). In a world where all is constructed and nothing is given there is no need for a poetic dimension, or poets. There is simply the endless production of synthetic texts, mimicking powerlessly the shifting of financial instruments in a fully financialized economy. Words become signs. In the beginning was the text and the credits still roll on long after the end of referents. Warren was hip to this consonance from the beginning and he watched as the Languagian junk traders filled better poets with doubts-Creeley for one, who driven by psychological imperatives he little understood, treacherously opened the gates of Buffalo (428). Recruited to write one of the Curricular Fascicles for Curriculum of the Soul -on "Mind"-Creeley evaded the assignment, "spooked," Warren says, by the religious dimension of the project; evidently Creeley was ready and willing to close down right brain intuitive experience. Perhaps this is why his poetry died before he did, becoming in his last readings the anodyne notations of a genial retiree.

In celebrating Curriculum of the Soul within "the underworld poetics and quantum resurrection cycle of Olson's right brain 'onslaught,'" Warren proposes that "SUNY Buffalo became a major site for a clash of poetics. The archetypal forces that drove these moieties to contest matters of language and soul, personality and power" there, "are dialectically structured; they can be imagined as two bicameral camps, each with cognitive biases, quantum effects, and poetic moods. On the one hand there is the left brain profane separatist Language clan of innies...indisposed toward the transcendental entity of soul. On the other hand there is the right brain sacred participatory wave Olsonian clan of outies, disposed toward the transcendental entity of soul" (422). The triumph of the Languagian innies, meant the construction of "deconstructive death ray adepts" aiming "at Olson's cult of the soul," with the intent of putting the Olsonian lineage-that is to say the Homeric Chain itself-under erasure and out of business.

Clayton Eshelman is the poet who seems to Warren to stand for the other star in the binary-though he too is in the Olsonian line, but; "Just as [John] Clarke is Olson's true successor in the upward thrust of imagination into the celestial realm of Sirius, Eshelman is his true successor in the downward thrust of imagination into the archaic realm of blood, cannibalism, monsters and rock" (369). Eshelman, with his fascination with the Cro-Magnon caves underwrites the subtitle of Part 2 of Warren's collection, "Archaic sexuality." Eshelman is interested in the body, ingestion, initiation; "his preferred realm is the labyrinth of lower nature" (370).In a brilliant review-essay of Eshelman's Companion Spider called "The Essence of Spider Man' Warren explores the explorer, so to speak, getting inside Eshelman's poetics as though finding his way into a cave, aware of dark possibility but also of stony limits. Insofar as poetry is soul-making-the poetic career a process of individuation-Warren argues that: "Like Olson, Eshelman writes in the wake of the modern revolution that banished religion from the unconscious. As Olson's life and work suggest, the soul, with all its feelings for the contents of the universe, is the battleground between the poet's original religious formation and his conscious regeneration in poetry" (371-2)-Eshelman's childhood Presbyterianism, like Olson's Catholicism, poses problems for the development of the soul and informs that development. The repression of the religious impulse and the attempt to locate a primeval religious/ poetic space is what gives Eshelman's poetic spelunking and soul archaeology its tension. As with Olson, the problem of salvation is never too far away.

Early in Captain Poetry there is a brief manifesto in the imperative mode written under the spell of Eshelman that might be read as Warren's ars critica, called simply "Ten Ways"-they seems to be ways of going below to overcome. The ten imperatives begin thus: Pursue, Comprehend, Master, Attend to, Turn, Hypostatsize, Leap, Drill, Blacken, Dance...rock on!

In Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) H.D. wrote that what the world needs is "appreciators" of art, a few people who could act as "receiving centres" for the telegraphic messages being beamed from great works of art. Few, today, are open to the messages, even fewer know how to respond. H.D. thought that even two or three such people with the right kind of brains, "could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought" (NTV 26, 27)-no doubt, this is the right brain "onslaught" of satanic energy activated by Homeric adepts and their captains and powers. Cap'n Ken Warren is one such. That is why we should dance with him. - Alec Marsh

https://bigbridge.org/BB17/reviews/Alec_Marsh2.html

As anyone who has spent time reviewing a book knows, it is often a thankless task. And unless you’re writing for the New York Review of Books or Harper’s, monetary rumination is negligible to nonexistent. I find it very hard work. One is doomed at the outset to feelings of arrogance, presumption, and deep insecurity. Who am I, one ponders, to be evaluating this person’s work? How can I honestly evaluate this person’s work without hurting anyone’s feelings or becoming a literary pariah never to be published again? without appearing to be a shameless sycophant if I give too much praise? without sounding like a complete idiot?

Kenneth Warren makes it look easy. And enjoyable. This near-500-page compendium of literary criticism covers a broad range of contemporary American poetry. It is evident that Warren takes a very keen interest in the work of Charles Olson and Clayton Eshleman, but there are many names with which I was unfamiliar, and soon became quite intrigued. I won’t reveal my ignorance and mention which names those were, but can say with absolute confidence that Warren’s essays cover a breadth of poetry that is nothing less than staggering. Weiners, Eigner, Creeley, Kerouac, Sanders, Susan Howe, Acker, Myles, Oppen, Hirschman, Kaufman, Wakoski, Grossinger, Tarn, Cage, Bremser, Waldman, Warsh, Codrescu, Sorrentino, Duncan, Dorn, and Snyder. This represents maybe half of the figures covered. Nor are all the figures “literary.” He also writes with zeal and insight about Bo Diddley and David Lynch.

The essays cover a period from 1980 to 2012. There is even a section devoted to the underground rock and punk scene in Cleveland, circa the mid-80s, where Warren spent 25 years as head librarian at the Lakewood Public Library. Here we find Warren among Cleveland’s packed punk rock crowds describing groups such as Mad Money, The Residents, The Mice and The Floyd Band. There’s a lively description of Johnny Thunders performing at the Phantasy Nite Club:

A classic New York type, a skinny kid with a beak who likes to fuss with his hair, a dead rock and roll animal from a garage in Jackson Heights, Queens, a smart ass who has probably seen it all from early snaps by the Rolling Stones on Channel 11’s old Clay Cole Show to Anita Pallenberg on the Sunday morning soul shot to nowhere. Naturally, when Thunders beached on the frozen northcoast, the F train’s Keith Richards soon found himself at the Phantasy Nite Club being ostracized by a bunch of Lake Erie misfits, torn as we always are between chronic depression and the need to transcend it with music.

I like the tone these early rock and roll essays set, and Warren’s edgy and colorful descriptions. One thing Warren is not: academic. The essays in this book, as its title suggests, are free of academic jargon. They’re fresh, invigorating, and unbridled by university politics. He does not resort to theory to support his views. He forms theories. He opines with sass and vinegar. His passions are unaffected and his oppositions are open, palpable hits.

Here, for instance, is his take on poetry’s bad boy Gregory Corso:

Gregory Corso has been insisting, ever since Shelley’s great lyricism spoke to him in jail, on the authority of his identity as poet. He has dared poetry, from the start, to move through him and become the expression of his soul. With the tools of his class, he has tried to muscle himself into the romantic tale of creation that transcends him. One of the earliest romantic elements to shape this practice is Corso’s belief that in time poetry true poetry would issue from the struggle between the self-creating word and street punk’s voice. So it is not surprising that he should be inclined more toward pronouncement than composition. Yet there is certainly the feeling in reading him that he has always needed something divine to blow his New York City accent, emotions, and personality off the block and into heaven.

This is but the opening paragraph. The essay continues for some several more pages evolving a view of Corso that is as encyclopedic as it is honest and perceptive. Warren, as would be characteristic of a head librarian with punk leanings, manages a tough erudition that never becomes stodgy or ponderous. I imagine him as the kind of librarian who greets you with enthusiasm as soon as you approach the desk with a question and leads you down the aisles pulling titles off the shelves and filling your arms with the glories of contemporary poetry.

A phrase caught my attention in Warren’s appraisal of Larry Eigner. “There is a memory at back of Eigner’s nonlinear constructions, a maternal imago to which his flux of nouns returns.” It had occurred to me before that Eigner’s confinement to a wheelchair might have something to do with his nonlinear constructions, but the way Warren describes it took me a little by surprise: “emotional, physical, and spiritual attachments to [Eigner’s mother] moves his concrete, elliptical involvement with objects over years into a much higher psychic focus.”

What surprised me was Warren’s emphasis on the psychological aspects of poetic construction. He counters the strictly linguistic aspects of writing promulgated by the Language movement – desubjectivized and bleached of interior vision – with a more humanized approach strongly influenced by poet Charles Olson. “We are ourselves both the instrument of discovery,” declaimed Olson in his seminal essay “Human Universe,” “and the instrument of definition.”

Warren looks for more balance. We don’t want the smelly sock stench of confessional poetry, but neither do we want a writing based entirely on collage, cut up, and mechanical assembly. Eigner is a perfect example of this. As stark and objective and fragmentary as his poetry can be, there is a deeply sensed presence behind the words, a reverence and caring and focus deepened by great compassion.

Not surprisingly, Warren’s most sustained focus is on the work of Charles Olson. He devotes over 50 pages to an exegesis of Charles Olson’s Selected Letters, edited by Ralph Maud. “As an initiate into a new epoch,” Warren observes, “Olson steps into the age of monopoly capitalism, ready to realize the world’s subservience to material, secular powers.” It all has to do with empire. “From ‘hideous’ interaction with elite political environments, Olson acquires the language, memories, and traits—the memes of empire, if you will—which eventually pass into the singular polis of The Maximus Poems.”

Warren follows the evolution of Olson’s development first as a government official, working for the Foreign Language Division, Office of War Information, and later as an employee of the Democratic National Committee, then focuses more on “Olson’s spiritual life.” “When Olson’s belief in progress wanes,” Warren observes, “tradition—with its store of archetype, hierarchy, myth and symbol—fills the ideological vacuum.”

Shortly after 1944, Olson decided to devote his life exclusively to poetry. He celebrated this in the poem “K.” Olson’s poetry, like Whitman’s, is declamatory and expansive and invites confidence in the scope of its vision. But don’t look to Olson for political wisdom. “…. there persists a liberal presumption that Olson’s postmodern project,” Warren writes, “unlike that of Pound, contains a measure of political wisdom. But the irrational is ultimately too large a force in Olson’s life and art for the reader to wager confidence on him as being a fount of political wisdom.”

Warren identifies Jung as a key element:

With Jung as guide, Olson pushes deeply into the world of archetypes, which is to say, into the world of spiritual realities. As the politician folds into the poet, revolution folds into tradition; soma folds into psyche. How the psyche functions in relation to archetype and form emerges for Olson as the crucial question…. For Olson “Muse” is, therefore, the archetype that intervenes from above to save the incarnate, socialized, time-bound poet from his subjectivity.

Warren also takes a deep and abiding interest in Clayton Eshleman, another poet for whom Jung and the agonies and ecstasies of poetic evolution evince a strong universal character. Eshleman is even more eclectic in his inclusion of world religions and myths, going as far back as the cave art of Upper Paleolithic France. In an essay titled “The Essence of Spider Man,” in honor of Eshleman’s totemic archetype the arachnid, and as a quip to the popular film series based on the Marvel comic book character, Warren notes Eshleman’s commitment to poetry as a journey of spiritual and psychological transformation. “For Eshleman,” he writes, “writing does not begin with the death of the author, as it does with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, but the with the death of the conditioned personality.”

He links Eshleman with Olson:

Spawn of the Sixties, Eshleman is no simple-minded hippie. From Caterpillar to Sulfur, Eshleman realizes as editor the high standard of inquiry set by Charles Olson’s interdisciplinary mandate, nurturing thinking among poets, while combating the decline of intellectual rigor within both Beat and New Left camps. By approaching the imagination through counterculture, moreover, Eshleman advances within the mythopoetic tradition, extending from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) through Robert Duncan’s The Truth and Life of Myth (1968), a humorous strain missing from his more seriously determined predecessors.

Warren, drawing from the essays in Eshleman’s Companion Spider, opposes the model of the poet as advanced by critics like Marjorie Perloff, whose overemphasis on craft leads to a place where “the said exists only in the saying.” “Poetic language,” Perloff remarks, “is never simply unique, natural, and universal; it is the product, in large part, of particular social, historical, and cultural formations. And these formations require study.” Yes, they do. I agree. But I can’t help feeling that something essential has been demoted, if not left out altogether. Which is vision. The poet as shaman. Poetry not just as a construction requiring craft and study but a medium of vision. It is in this particular zone that Warren champions Eshleman’s example.

With Eshleman there is no denying individuation must inform the path through which the poet is born. While the romantic emphasis on the individual persists in Companion Spider, authorial personality is now linked to the psychological process and symbolic language of alchemy … To become a poet, suggests Eshleman, individual character must be cooked, armor processed, resistances integrated.

I don’t think I could overstate the importance of a book like Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch to a young person beginning their journey as a poet. It provides a comprehensive view of the development of poetry in America in the last three decades. Warren was himself a student at the legendary Black Mountain College where luminaries such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, John Weiners and Robert Creeley taught. Warren is a captain, indeed, and this book is a companionable log to the navigation of poetry. - John Olson

https://thevolta.org/fridayfeature-captainpoetryssuckerpunch.html

“The title of Ken Warren’s selective and provocative history of

American poets and poetry over the past thirty years comes from an

incident partially narrated in Tom Clark’s Charles Olson. The Allegory

of a Poet’s Life [318] in which Gregory Corso makes a disruptive

appearance in Olson’s afternoon seminar on myth, 1964. I say

“partially” because as a member of that class and a witness to the

events of that afternoon it seems to me Clark omits a few important

facts, e.g. that after challenging the assembled students to match him

in reciting from memory lines of Shelley (or perhaps by extension any

poet) and hearing only universal silence, Corso began pointing out

with increasing intensity that “we are all on death row” and that he

was “Captain Poetry”. Finally he turned to Olson: “Aren’t I Captain

Poetry, Charles?” “Yes,” Olson replied. “Then what should I do?”

And without missing a beat Olson said calmly and with some humor,

“report for duty.” David Posner, the Curator of the Lockwood Poetry

library, never stepped into the room – the fracas happened after Corso

had fled Olson’s class. It did not then and has never since seemed to

me that Olson asked Corso to report to him, though the exchange might

be interpreted so; rather, I took Olson to mean report to Poetry.

Certainly that’s what Olson was teaching. And it’s worth mentioning

here because Ken Warren’s work over the past three decades, both as

editor and publisher of House Organ (an occasional magazine in which

some of these pieces first appeared) and as a freelance essayist and

critic outside academic writing, constitutes the sort of discipline,

dedication, and persistence which Poetry has demanded from him, not as

a maker of poems but as a friend, an ear, a receptive mind.”

- Albert Glover, editor of Letters for Origin, 1950—1956 by Charles

Olson, (Cape Goliard, 1969)

“Kenneth Warren thinks the world through the poetry of those poets who

have thought the world through their poetry. When working on Olson,

for instance, Warren travels every path opened by this multitentacled

explorer, and goes farther, with the poet, to the places he suggested

but pursued only in part. Warren is one of the few and great readers

of American poetry who accompanies poets on their missions and takes

their work to where their “sunflower wishes to go,” serving in this

way not just Poesy, but the regions Poesy herself aims for. Warren is

the philosopher-friend of poets who imagine the sublime, a fearless

companion who serves out their sentences with vigor, aplomb, and even

delight. He is a masochist, a poet, and a star.”

- Andrei Codrescu, author of Whatever Gets You Through the Night: a

Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (Princeton, 2011)

“If you have any interest in poetry, the poetry that matters, Ken

Warren's Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch needs to be your constant

companion. It is a critical examination of the past thirty years of

poetry ( plus some film & music), and it’s a language event in itself,

a poetic mirroring of the occasion for its writing of not only what's

new but what's news worthy. The list of writers, essential but too

often ignored, is impressive: Kerouac, Snyder, Corso, Wakoski, Acker,

Eshleman, Doubiago, Eigner, d. a. levy, Susan Howe, Hirschman, Oppen,

Tarn, as well as cultural figures like John Cage, Simone Weil, David

Lynch, Bo Diddley, and including the major revision of the Charles

Olson and Vincent Ferrini relationship, the importance of Jack Clarke,

teacher, scholar, poet, all set in the human context (the Homeric

subtitle) that makes even the archaic contemporary.”

- Joe Napora, author of Sentences and Bills—1917 (Wind, 2011)

“If Kafka is correct, when he says that impatience is mankind’s worst

sin, then the high accomplishment of Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch can

be taken as a lesson in virtue. The divine madness that stirs at the

surface of these pages, written across a span of thirty years, recalls

Coltrane’s intent “to start in the middle… and move both directions at

once.” Here, those directions point to Olson, on one end, and to Jack

Clarke (the author’s teacher at Buffalo, along with Bob Creeley), on

the other. More than an extraordinary taikyoku that reviews certain

“avant-garde” trends in American writing—from Reagan to the Tea

Party—the present collection, arranged in a-chronological sequence and

organized along a fourfold axis, shows a mind in the process of

self-discovery—at the intersection (“hole”) of what Henry Corbin, in

his writing on Ismaili gnosis, has described as linear (“Punk”) time

and cyclical (“Homeric”) time. The effect is like reading Jung’s

recently (re-)published Red Book, and finding echoes in it of Pere

Ubu’s Datapanik in the Year Zero.”

- André Spears, author of Fragments from Mu (A Sequel) (First Intensity, 2007)

Born in New York City in 1953, Kenneth Warren is the editor of House Organ, a quarterly letter of poetry and prose. His two collections of poetry are Rock/the Boat: Book One (Oasis Press, 1998) and The Wandering Boy (Flo Press, 1979).

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/news/captain-poetry’s-sucker-punch-a-guide-to-the-homeric-punkhole-1980–2012-by-kenneth-warren-now-available-83/

HOUSE ORGAN #58 Win/Spr ’07, Edited by Kenneth Warren (Lakewood, Ohio, 2007)

https://honoringkenwarren.wordpress.com/

FUN IN THE ETERNAL CITY

House Organ is a personal endeavor that escapes the crippling baggage that generally accompanies such affairs. Kenneth Warren edits and publishes each issue, sending them out from his residence in Lakewood, Ohio. Unassuming in appearance, House Organ consists of several sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper folded vertically in half with a single staple affixing the spine; addresses are written on the back and postage attached—no need for envelopes—each issue contains poems, ongoing critical engagements, reviews, and memoirs. As Warren has termed the publication, it is a donor organ. This appears to be meant literally, those who receive it in the mail along with those who it publishes, donate their time and person to an ongoing, active engagement with poetry. Warren is paying attention below the usual radar. It would be of no surprise to one day run into him without ever knowing it and for him to have all the words needed for conversation at hand without any concern for hobnobbing or any “who’s who” nonsense. This is the sense of mind evidenced by his editorial judgment along with the continuing productivity and longevity of the Organ.

Stephen Ellis is among the core group of poets Warren draws upon for repeat appearances in the issues and he is pleasantly included in issue #58. Ellis marks his poetic engagement with striking word choice and rapid springs of rushed motivation, getting the physical down into fluid fourteen line structures of dazzling arrangement.

Returning Libido To Its Source

Lust perhaps turns into devotion

to object not inverted to subject,

beginning each phase of life as amateur

all over again, obligatory ritual

Ginger Rogers singing We’re In

The Money in pig-latin, as nothing

previously understood, except as the pre-

history each passing moment passes into,

pulled always back into the present as we are,

caught before nature’s hieroglyphs, garbled

as devotion’s objects often are, by one’s own

intercession to love itself, to release

the self from each subject’s hold, and hold

equally to each and every object’s activation

The poem is engagement with living. Ellis is working out his own psychological battles within the formal grace of language bent to his means. As an editor, Warren appears drawn to writers who are interested in writing with direct treatment of the text as an extension of their person over any particular branch of poetics or level of discipline achieved. As a result, the sensibilities displayed by the work in each issue vary wildly. Margueritte (a pen name? No last name is ever given), whose work I have not seen elsewhere, provides juxtaposition to Ellis.

broken piece

eye round fastened to grass

tall waving eye follows

grass cooled by wind eye

why you say it is heaven

I say watch out someone

will take it away

when you are not looking

Where Ellis is challenging, engaging the reader’s intellect, Margueritte is coy and playful, simple in word choice and delivered in a relaxed mood of warning. Each poet is careful in craft and is intent on getting a message across to the reader, yet the ultimate atmospheres created by each are separated by distinctly distant relationships to the language. 

Warren’s address book would be a pleasure to behold. The surprises contained inside must be like discovering a terrific used book store stocked full of small press ephemera that only those readers who have really put in the time are aware of. Reading House Organ returns the physical pleasure of the text to the reader in contrast to the screen culture so prevalent to many relations these days. The sense of community is strong and grounded by deeply extended roots reaching far back. Janine Pommy Vega, a poet found most usually in secondary sources on women of the Beat Generation, makes regular appearances in House Organ. Her poems continually pull at the reader’s sensibilities and focus the imagination upon the revelation the world about is.

Eternal City

(for Corine Young)

On the banks of the Tevere

eternity casts its light

on the trees at 7pm

traffic roaring

Caravaggio saw this light

Botticelli

last gulls patrol the surface

for dinner, hold caucuses

on the muddy bank

Roma antica

harboring a populace spread

over seven hills for 2500 years

blackberry canes

cut back on the bank

a flock of tiny birds swoops and dives

grey brown with white belly bands

like little ladies in aprons

they serenade the bridge Risorgimento

little neighbors of the Tiber

huing and crying in wide concentric

arcs from the water as high as the bridge

gold fades to rose on the ancient buildings

Michaelangelo painted this light

Leonardo de Vinci

having flung themselves in controlled abandon

the birds carve out figure eights

on the water, last hosannahs

Fra Angelico would have recognized

fun in the Eternal City

twenty of them circling in the light.

Warren is more than willing to provide a space of publication for those who often aren’t involved with any particular scene in the current poetry world. Reading through House Organ is a true fringe experience in the best sense, for found inside are folks who write for no other reason than testimonial to a life that has been given over to poetry. It’s a challenge to realize that the reason one or another poem come across might not be particularly appealing is due to inadequacies within one’s own reading and life experience. There’s little doubt that anything Warren publishes does not deserve an attentive eye and ear. 

There’s a bevy of men living various lifestyles, what might once have been considered as blue collar, scattered throughout the upper Midwest who are all practicing writers often overlooked by a larger audience but quite familiar to each other. Brian Richards, along with the aforementioned Stephen Ellis, is one of these men. Here and there, a publication of theirs surfaces or the occasional piece appears in House Organ or another rogue journal. Much of this Win/Spr ‘07 issue is taken up by a long section from what appears to be a semi-fictionalized memoir of sorts by Richards, In Rain. Richards’ prose is of an uneven rambling sort but provides its own rewards to attentive readers. There are many characters and lots of starts and stops to any potential plot development, but a vigorous thrust is strongly held to throughout which propels the piece along on self-generated inertia alone. At his best, Richards is a reflective writer and when he comes upon the opportunity not to be mentioning this-or-that trouble this particular group of friends is having he revels in it, to the delight of the reader.

Or, once, he wandered up the hillside, close enough to keep the party in view, but far enough that the conversation went symphonic: a hum of strings, a murmur of winds punctuated by brassy laughter. As the night wore on and the drugs off, the quiet grew until he could hear the occasional fog horn on the straits. But the sky had cleared so he could see lights miles away on the water, and he realized that what he was hearing through his distorted perception were nighthawk wings cutting the air around him in pursuit of gnats. The sky swelled with light in the east, the remaining cloud above the mountains stretched like a dragon flying slowly north, its belly pulsing with the sun that seemed to take forever before it finally breasted the peaks and he walked down to find their bed.

Once again, the treatment is direct, the resulting sense of location vivid and lively. Richards breaks through any sentimentalism for the setting and writes just what is occurring, a reminder that writing is an act of communication, binding reader and writer together, to take share in a greater whole.

What Warren offers of his own writing is a section from an ongoing critical study of the relationship of Gloucester poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, The Emperor’s New Code. Warren is co-editor of Ferrini’s recent The Whole Song: Selected Poems and it is evident that he’s a familiar reader of this prolific poet. Ultimately, no matter how Jungian and mytho-exploratory in moments it may be, this excerpt of Warren’s interpretive critique of the personal/psychological dimensions shared between Olson and Ferrini is a constant wonder of fascination and sparkles with bursts of argument. Warren dives right in and goes deep, his attentive critique of the relationship testifies to its central place in current and future studies of Olson. Ferrini’s own work encourages the level of discussion at which Warren negotiates.

THE DIVINE INTELLIGIENCE

DEATH is asleep

for the EMBODIMENT of the WHOLE

THE GRAIL of my Mother & Father

the Carriers of the SPIRIT

of them both

& the Mystique of my Muse

in the ONE

by the Actions of the Creating Energies

where Time is a fiction

Humanity is constantly

Recycled through

all the Forms of Nature

& the ever-elucidating Cosmos

the Revolution & the Resurrection

together

lost & found in the ONE

Ferrini is the closest America has come so far in producing its own William Blake. His poems announce a personal cosmology which he has defined to suit his own purposes where the available materials were lacking. Warren’s commentary further explores the facts of Olson’s recognition of the powers Ferrini’s work possesses and elucidates the according respect Olson offered, along with his acting in the appropriately aggrandizing manner towards his contemporary rival.

Poet Simon Perchik closes his review of Bangalore Blue by Terry Kennedy with a note on the physical nature of the book:

One last word on the book itself. It is a joy to hold. Much thought went into putting it together and in the sequence. It’s a book, not just a collection of poems. Each poem leads into the next and the reader is comforted by the obvious care taken in presenting Kennedy’s work. Here is a case where all involved have taken duty to heart.

House Organ may not cater towards elegance in terms of materials used in its construction, but let it be assured that the endeavor has indeed “taken duty to heart.” Duty to the life of writing, living among the texts that they might breathe a little easier in turn as the humble reader turns from them to create her own. - Patrick James Dunagan

http://galatearesurrection7.blogspot.com/2007/08/house-organ-edited-by-kenneth-warren.html

Self-suspended sacrifice to the cause, the well lived and well hanged man. That's what initially comes to mind when I think of Ken Warren. 23 is the number of the Hanged Man and it's also a chapter from The Book of Lies, where we get What Man is at ease at his Inn? / Get out...The Way out is THE WAY. Ken got out alright. Shortly after his retirement from over 25 years as the Director of the Lakewood Public Library he left behind his old life in Cleveland, and on sheer impulse bought a house on Lake Ontario in western New York. Water was essential to his working. Even in the dead of the Great Lake winter he'd do his Qui Gong every morning, sometimes lying flatout on the frozen water. His was a special attunement that I only knew a portion of. So I could speculate on many aspects of this life hotly pursued but it would be mere fictive uncertainty. Faced with this aporia I'll stick to what I narrowly know about Ken. In The Special Body we look at the body and yet avert any look into its anatomy (from outside). It's us, rather it's the option to hear that gets passed over (240). In the case of Ken Warren probably one of his greatest gifts or should I say talents, amongst many, was his laugh. Upwelling from his gut and soul Ken's baritone laugh was a piece of magical vibration that could alter most any mood on the spot. Born from an expertly tuned orator's voice proprioception at its finest. No matter how bad things were going Ken's laugh could always effectively subvert the negative. It had to be heard. In his written legacy a hint of this joyous outpouring can still be sampled (See Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch, Blaze Vox Press, 2012). His laughter brings to mind the legend of Tyl Eulenspiegel, from the low country of medieval Europe. Eulenspiegel, translates roughly as owl glass or howl glass, the incorrigible jester whose jokes and witticisms were devised to expose and or reflect the folly and irony of all around through his poignant interpretation of their machinations. Ken's writing demonstrated a high degree of selfawareness, a veritable speculum that reflects on him as much as it does on his readers. Literature at large was open game for Ken Warren. He knew not to take himself seriously, and in the Emperor Wears No Clothes, even though he had his fans, Ken realized that he enervated quite a few people with his own peculiar take on the Ferrini / Olson arena. He enjoyed it. With the realization of this series as an intrepid exposure he laughed all the way to the intellectual offshore antiacademic bank of independent learning. 

For Ken, as he told me in one of our last conversations, The Book is the Womb, the repository and safe space of all that is worth anything here. This was his strong belief in every way and his maintaining the journal of House Organ for 22 years, beginning in the winter of 1993, was the proof in the pudding of that devotion. The book as a touchstone fetish. As a result he never afforded House Organ an online presence or made available an eversion of his zinethis would have been an affront to the whole project.

Milton suggested the poet's life should be a poem. To this aspiration The Special Body queries What is mortality? Has anyone raised that question within the interpreting guises of poetry or cultural artifact?(144) As a testament of sorts those of us who knew Ken Warren understood that he was House Organartifact and artificer covalent. Ken was the father of his Organ(ized family and anyone who got to know him through his magazine will attest to the level of care and enthusiasm he gave. The Organ subsequently has ceased pumping, being pumped. As for Dorn The Earth is a Turbine, a new standin for 'the machine(139) so is House Organ an engine, a series of stanzas in Ken Warren's living poem or l'oevre vie. Each issue was full of various poets' lodes with Ken's essays in the back, typically forming some psychopompic midrash to the encradled verse of that given issue. Towards the end his prose gained greater clarity and insight and concision. Who knows what he may have achieved had he been able to continue. The cessation of his word, breath, logos, the grinding stillness of the Organ answers an aspect of that question of mortality. There's an old saying, reality grows out of the end of a loaded shotgun barrel. Emptied, does it go beyond I wonder.

Then came suddenly

to rest, the barrel utterly justified

with a line pointing

to the neighborhood of infinity.

Ed Dorn, Gunslinger 

The emperor stripped of the sheath, his pen set down: these lines do point toward an infinite unfolding. The significance is laid open as its source is shut as if the words were part and parcel of what Bruno called the continuous body. The continuum is forever enriched where we are left to cope with remains.

Ken's turbine was the anima mundi. And being a lover meant the world to him. His understanding of relationships was rooted in the animus. The animus has hooks Ken once stated to me, and we have a choice, we can either avoid them, stay in isolation, or allow them to grab us and take us for a ride. He then proceeded to elucidate on a number of poets who are armchair enthusiasts of the animus as far as he was concerned (who shall remain nameless). Ken himself was certainly not one of them by a longshot. He embraced the wonders of eros and danced that tarantella as long and as hard as it would take him. In The Special Body (Pleistoncenely aware) Soul...an erogeny of being beyond proof, beyond the capable negation of consciousness, re-

instituting the positivities of eros as ore.(135) In Sufiesque fashion to Ken it was the erotic ore that holds the real charge that digs us. He was devoted to matters of the heart and the heart's matter oddly enough was his undoing on this goaround. But the contra dance goes on no matter what and I'll wager Ken's probably having a ball on his new alternate line. 

Death is a negation of sorts, the penultimate apophasis for many minds here. At the close of Kydd's A Spanish Tragedy Revenge suggests that the endless tragedy begins in the afterlife. Hieronymo's bit off his own tongue, silenced himself, and then killed himself thus putting an exponentially reinforced termination to his word. Is this negation doubled or just madness taking care of business? In the case of Hieronymo the question will always arise: was he crazy like a madman, a fox or a little bit of both. Ken, the defrocked emperor, is undoubtedly a fox whose quill holds a knife's edge and a long shelflife. His tricksterly spirit should continue to reflect and multiply with each reading's polishing action. The big laugh will have its traction beyond our time. - Robert Podgurski

http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Yesterday we were saddened to hear the news of Kenneth Warren's death at the age of 63. Jim O'Bryan at the Lakewood Observer writes:

This morning one of the best humans I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with passed away. Kenneth Warren, age 63, died of a heart attack. His son Parker was by his side according to his other son Beckett who called me.

He had been feeling bad since heading back to New York to take care of his parents, from a poetry session celebrating friend Herbert Gold, at Lakewood Public Library, the institution he headed for 25 years and made it the top library in the country 6 years in a row. He went to his acupuncturist who treated him. He still felt bad, and Parker headed to New York to take him to the "Western Doctor" at noon. While waiting to leave he suffered a massive heart attack, and was pronounced dead in his home.

Warren was the longstanding editor of House Organ, the lengthwise-folded single-stapled pamphlet which, over the years, published an array of poets (young and old, established and emerging). If a copy of House Organ never graced your hands, you can get a sense of these simple and elegantly DIY'd publications from Patrick James Dunagan's 2007 review on galatea resurrects:

House Organ is a personal endeavor that escapes the crippling baggage that generally accompanies such affairs. Kenneth Warren edits and publishes each issue, sending them out from his residence in Lakewood, Ohio. Unassuming in appearance, House Organ consists of several sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper folded vertically in half with a single staple affixing the spine; addresses are written on the back and postage attached—no need for envelopes—each issue contains poems, ongoing critical engagements, reviews, and memoirs. As Warren has termed the publication, it is a donor organ. This appears to be meant literally, those who receive it in the mail along with those who it publishes, donate their time and person to an ongoing, active engagement with poetry. Warren is paying attention below the usual radar. It would be of no surprise to one day run into him without ever knowing it and for him to have all the words needed for conversation at hand without any concern for hobnobbing or any “who’s who” nonsense. This is the sense of mind evidenced by his editorial judgment along with the continuing productivity and longevity of the Organ.

Warren was also the author the eclectic and intellectually capacious Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–2012, a collection of essays on poetry and music that was 30 years in the making. His presence in poetry will be greatly missed.

And for more on Warren's life and work, head here to read Peter Anastas's tribute.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/05/kenneth-warren-editor-of-house-organ-dies-at-63