Paul Metcalf

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Paul Metcalf (1917-1999). Photo by Jonathan Williams. Courtesy Jacket.

Paul C. Metcalf (1917-1999) was an experimental American poet and prose writer.

Life

Metcalf was born in 1917 in East Milton, Massachusetts.

He was the great-grandson of Herman Melville.

He attended Harvard University, but disliked it and dropped out in his freshman year.

In 1942, he married Nancy Blackford of South Carolina. Over the next 2 decades the couple spent long periods in the southern United States.

Paul Metcalf (1917-1999)

Metcalf traveled widely through North and South America. He drew from these travels for his works. Among his friends and associates were poet Charles Olson (whom Metcalf met when he was 13), artist Josef Albers, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, and writer Guy Davenport.

Later in his career, Metcalf was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, State University of Ney York at Albany, and the University of Kansas.

He died in 1999, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Writing

Metcalf's work draws on a wide range of material, including history, anthropology and folklore, travel narratives, geography, Indian lore, geology, and physiology. His work is difficult to classify according to the conventional categories of essay, journal, and fiction; thus his label as an "experimental" writer.

Form and structure are of utmost importance to his art. Characteristic of his method is the assemblage of texts from a variety of sources fused into a new whole, and much of his work melds these several voices with that of his own. His earliest works used common fictional devices (storyline, characterization, dialogue), but soon Metcalf began pushing past such conventions.

His novel Genoa (1965), subtitled "A Telling of Wonders," is a portrait of 2 physically deformed brothers, one a vagabond / murderer, and the other, a mediocre doctor and the narrator of the story. Interleaved with their story are passages from Melville and the journals of Christopher Columbus, dropped into the mind of the narrator. These serve to mythologize the events of the novel. The writer Guy Davenport described Genoa as being a "built" thing: "an architecture of analogies, similitudes, and Melvillean metaphor."

In later works, Patagoni (1971), for instance, and especially by Apalache (1976), the semblance of story is gone. Apalache is a collage of texts taken from early American journals, exploration narratives, and newspaper articles that Metcalf uses to reconstruct American history in epic scope and form. Like William Carlos Williams before him, Metcalf freely mixes verse and prose.

Waters of Potowmack (1982), a documentary history of the Potomac River, and other works such as U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980) and I-57 (1988), continue Metcalf's preoccupation with "juxtaposition" and documentary forms. Other Metcalf works include The Island (1982), Golden Delicious (1985), and Huascaran (1997).

In describing his technique, Metcalf uses the word "juxtaposition": the union of seemingly disparate or disjointed elements. These elements (what poet Donald Byrd refers to as "immense rhymes") are the building blocks of Metcalf's books. Greater than single words, they are often whole passages from other texts. "The difference is simply the size and proportion of the units I use: instead of words, I use whole lives, concepts, episodes, epochs." Metcalf quotes a remark of Edgar Allan Poe as it applies to his own work, "To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine." He emphasizes the organizing intelligence as opposed to random association and the "cut-ups" that are a hallmark of writers such as William Burroughs."

Metcalf's books have also been described in terms of music—"symphonic", "polyphonic," emphasizing the multitude of voices within that blend into one. His work was influenced by Ezra Pound (especially the Cantos), William Carlos Williams (Paterson, In the American Grain), and Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael, parts of the Maximus Poems).

In an interview with John O'Brien, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Metcalf discussed his poetics and influences. Metcalf was not a theorist like Pound and Olson, but he did have a strong sense of what writing and art should be and what he was trying to accomplish.

His work has attracted a loyal following, including Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds.

Recognition

In 1996-1997, Coffee House Press issued a 3-volume collection of Metcalf's works, covering 1956 to 1997.

Publications

Poetry

• Will West. Asheville, NC: Jonathan Williams, 1956; Lenox, MA: Bookstore Press, 1973.
• Patagoni. Penland, NC: Jargon Society, 1971.
• Apalache. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1976.
• The Middle Passage: A triptych of commodities. Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1976.
• Zip Odes. Lawrence, KS: Tansy Press, 1979.
• U.S. Dept. of the Interior. Frankfort, KY: Gnomon Press, 1980.
• The Island. Lawrence, KS: Tansy Press, 1982.
• Waters of Potowmack. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982; Charlottesville, VA: University of Virgina Press, 2002.
• Golden Delicious. Tucson, AZ: Chax Press, 1985; Milwaukee, WI: Membrane Press, 1989.
• Willie's Throw. Richmond, MA: Mad River Press, 1989.
• I-57. New Haven, CT: LongRiver Books, 1988.
• 3 X 3 (by Paul C. Metcalf; Fielding Dawson; & Michael Rumaker). Rocky Mount, NC: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1989.

Novels

• Genoa: A telling of wonders. Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams, 1965; Penland, NC: Jargon Society, 1973; Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2015.
• Both. Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982.

Non-fiction

• Where Do You Put the Horse? Essays. Elmwood Park, IL : Dalkey Archive Press, 1986.
• From Quarry Road: Uncollectd essays and reviews (edited by Robert Buckeye). East Middlebury, VT: Amandla, 2002.

Collected editions

• Collected Works 1, 1956-1976. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1996.
• Collected Works 3, 1976-1986. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.
• Collected Works 3, 1987-1997. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997.

Letters

• Enter Isabel: The Herman Melville correspondence of Clare Spark and Paul Metcalf. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

Fonds

His papers from 1917–1999 are held in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

External links

Books

• Paul Metcalf at Amazon.com

About

• New York Times Obituary; Paul Metcalf, 81; Wrote Experimental Tales
• Description of Metcalf's collection of essays, Where Do You Put the Horse?, Dalkey Archive
• Transcript of an interview with Metcalf by John O'Brien of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Archive
• David McCooey. No Wooden Horse review of Metcalf's Collected Works (Coffee House Press)
• [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/tag/paul-metcalf
• Coffee House Press Editors And Writers On Indie Literary Publishing; Huffington Post
• John O'Brien: "The Man Who Would Ban Happy Endings"; The New York Observer, 2011
• Don Byrd. "Review of Metcalf's Collected Works
• Coffee House Press release of Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume ITemplate:Dead link
• Coffee House Press release of Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume II
• Coffee House Press release of Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume III