The Ephus

1.

Whatever one thought personally of Joel Oppenheimer, an evening spent in his company was electrifying. You could see the man disintegrating before your eyes, and yet his voice was deep and resonant, filled with the gravel and experience of an urban blues singer, and he spoke so coherently about his passion for writing. His take on poetry was not as unorthodox as some might think. He was of the tradition, if by tradition one meant Williams and Pound, Olson and Creeley. But it was a proscribed poetics, even to the acolytes like myself. If you drifted beyond the precincts of Black Mountain, Joel could be as severe as the Franciscan monks of my childhood, whapping your knuckles (metaphorically speaking in Joel’s case) with the wooden triangular ruler. Joel Oppenheimer did not fancy us writing like Frank O’Hara or Ted Berrigan, though he might complement you for writing like Paul Blackburn or Ed Dorn. He was far too vulnerable to be truly macho, and yet some of the things he said could be construed as being macho, certainly words that were not sensitive to what Frank O’Hara called ‘feminine, marvelous, tough’, though Joel might sanction the last type of poem – a tough one – he didn’t seem at all inclined to see us write either the feminine or marvellous poem, even from the few women in our workshop class, many of whom were marvellous and tough.


2.

With five relatively short poems in the Don ...