DAVIDSON, Michael

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Nationality: American. Born: Oakland, California, 18 December 1944. Education: San Francisco State University, 1963–67, B.A. 1967; State University of New York, Buffalo, 1967–71, Ph.D. 1971; post-doctoral fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 1974–75. Family: Married 1) Carol Wikarska in 1970 (divorced 1974); 2) Lori Chamberlain in 1988; two children. Career: Visiting lecturer, San Diego State University, 1973–76. Curator, Archive for New Poetry, 1975–85, and since 1977 professor of literature, University of California, San Diego. Advisory editor, Fiction International, Canton, New York; advisory editor, Sagetrieb, River City; editor, The Archive Newsletter and Documents for New Poetry, both in La Jolla, California. Award: National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1976. Address: Department of Literature, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Exchanges. Los Angeles, Prose and Verses Press, 1972.

Two Views of Pears. Berkeley, California, Sand Dollar, 1973.

The Mutabilities, and The Foul Papers. Berkeley, California, Sand Dollar, 1976.

Summer Letters. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

Grillwork. Montreal, M.B.M. Monographs, 1980.

Discovering Motion. Berkeley, California, Little Dinosaur Press, 1980.

The Prose of Fact. Berkeley, California, Figures, 1981.

The Landing of Rochambeau. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1985.

Analogy of the Ion. Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Figures, 1988.

Post Hoc. San Francisco, Avenue B, 1990.

Leningrad. San Francisco, Mercury House, 1991.

The Arcades. Oakland, California, O Books, 1998.

Other

The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.

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Critical Studies: The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition by Marjorie Perloff, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985; Poet's Prose by Steve Fredman, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993; Palmer/Davidson: Poets and Critics Respond to the Poetry of Michael Palmer and Michael Davidson, edited by P. Michael Campbell, Berkeley, Occident Press, 1992.

Michael Davidson comments:

My first encounters with poetry occurred, as they did for most of my generation, via Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry. As I remember, "classic" poems were presented, followed by four or five seminal questions that, once answered by the bright literature student, would solve the curious riddle hidden, intentionally, no doubt, in the poem. Such an approach to poetry was pretty intimidating for a young writer. After all, the poet presumably had thought these strategies out before sitting down to write, and my early practice simply involved writing "toward" some vaguely formed idea. The Brooks and Warren method of literary analysis was accompanied in creative writing workshops by stern lectures on what was then called the "craft" of poetry, that is, the poet's ability to exert his will to power over form. The supreme poet, then, was one who could channel the multifarious happenings of daily life into a series of discrete, oblique figures, usually involving some part of the poet's inner organs or perhaps his ancestral origins. This rather inhospitable atmosphere was an important formulating experience for my own work, but under the salutary influence of the poetry renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s in San Francisco I resumed the practice of writing toward some vaguely formed idea.

I would like to think of my work as an interrogation or exploration of its own processes, not for the sake of formalist exercise but in order to test the thresholds of meaning. In this sense poetry is a profoundly human activity since it refuses to take the world for granted while believing utterly in its multifaceted character. The most difficult task for the poet, as Jack Spicer pointed out, is avoiding what you want to say since this invariably results in a trivializing of that initial charge that drove you to write in the first place. And oddly enough, the result is something extremely personal, if only because the writing embodies the wandering, desultory quality of one's thoughts. At times this "tracing" involves areas of interruption and semantic breakdown since it is often where language fails to provide necessary information, or where it provides the unwanted figure, slip of tongue, or typo, that it most reveals. How, then, to capture that quality? At the simplest level, by being open to the qualities and textures and confusions of one's own language as it struggles with difficult material and alternately by avoiding the lure of an imperializing rhetoric that yearns to "temper" that experience by subordinating its semantic plurality. This may not be a practical solution, but it is at least the atmosphere in which the various solutions offered in my writing have been nurtured.

(1995) The emphasis above is on writing as an "interrogation or exploration of its own processes," and while I still stand by those remarks, I would qualify them by adding that there are no processes that are writing's own. Language is social, even in those moments when it is being used to provide sanctuary from the social. Linguistic interrogation and exploration must also attend to the social idiolects in which writing appears—the voices, dialects, and rhetorics of people in groups. Testing the thresholds of meaning cannot be done in a vacuum. Meaning is a collaborative activity among individuals, not something congealed in a text. Any challenge to sedimented usage is simultaneously an attack on the institutions for which it has become normalized. This does not mean that individual expression is dead, only that it achieves its authority by acknowledging its contingent, dialogic, and tenuous nature.

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"To 'do' one's art," Michael Davidson writes, "means to solve problems in a language which the art establishes as it is being created. Its grammar and lexicon emerge less as a result of a commitment to prior forms and more as a response to immediate necessity." The locus of interest in Davidson's The Mutabilities, and The Foul Papers is precisely in watching the response to immediate necessity unfold. The poems are, as it were, live performances.

The epigraph to the volume is from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and the pervading tone is Shandean. Davidson's poetry turns on a sense of language as a persistent but unreliable medium. Above all, "I"—the sign that traditionally holds a privileged place in language as the center of control—is very slippery and unstable. It would not be an oversimplification to say that Davidson's work is an investigation of language in which the "I" becomes as much a matter of conjecture as everything else:

   Marking this way
   as a direction one comes to know
   one is known,
   hence you are still you
   and I
   am not so sure.

Lacking a dependable ordering ego, the poems are variations on unstated—and unstatable-themes, or, as in "Often he felt uncomfortable," on a theme that is itself mutable. The idiomatic phrase "to come out" is loaded with ambiguities, and in this poem Davidson uses it in a half-dozen or more different senses. The central matter of conjecture, however, is how words come out. Of all things their coming out is most mysterious: "and the vipers and bats and lizards come out of nowhere / which is a word out of which other words come out." The origins of language are completely concealed by the fact that whatever they might be can only be stated in language:

   in the beginning was the word and when it was out
   there was a space projected like a little star
   out of which all the light we have ever seen came pouring
   one word at a time.

There is nothing occult, nothing hidden, in Davidson's poetry. It is, like the poetry of Michael Palmer, a poetry of surfaces.

"The Foul Papers" (The Mutabilities) are prose poems, but their strategies are fundamentally like those found in Davidson's other work. In the title piece of the section, for example, there are seven paragraphs about some unnamed "he" who is, however, "close to," if not identical with, the "I" who gives the account. Although the paragraphs are very loosely organized, they do have centers of concerns. The first is about his loss of virginity, the second a concert by the Coasters, the third his "47 Plymouth with blue Satin seat covers," the fourth the cat odors in his house, the fifth a list of things he has to do on some relatively uneventful day, the sixth a love affair (perhaps with the woman with whom he speaks in the second), and the last a conversation with another woman. Although it is possible to trace several lines of connection through the piece, one of the primary conjectural centers has to do with smell. The piece concludes with "so their conversation draws on into empty night, the prospect emptying itself into their conversation until only smells remain and which, in time, take on the unexpected pressure of beauty." It is just that "unexpected pressure of beauty," issuing from what seems rather unpromising material, that is the dominant effect of Davidson's work.

The so-called language movement with which Davidson's work is identified has run the course of its initial impulse. Unlike some of the other language poets, such as Bruce Andrews, who have been drawn more to performance, Davidson's work seems increasingly to demonstrate philosophical and critical points. Analogy of the Ion, for example, could almost be used as a text in a graduate seminar in literary theory, for in its ironic mode it touches on many of the major points.

—Don Byrd