Jesse Glass

 

The Return of David Gitin

Suddenly back among us, a poet praised by legendary voices as diverse as John Cage's ("The work is beautiful") and A.R. Ammons' ("David Gitin touches a sort of Zen infinitude"), with further praise added from Objectivist legends Karl Rakosi and George Oppen. Open the book and find that the praise is merited. The work is spare, tight, intelligent and cannily on target.

           islands of self
challenged

                       or at once someone else, object
of my own attentions, beloved
                                husband to that love
                                          another proffers

                                never to be inside
                                          more skins than one

                                                   the pupil
                                          of the third eye
                                found wanting

  "I want."      knowing
           what I need to know
            subject         to the unrelenting

  surge of one
                     self     who
                                knows
           who knows?
                                nobody.

("March Winds")

"...Knowing/what I need to know..." indeed, the content a perfect weld with form. The deft dance of the mind down the page, speaking of what is even as it moves into what is not, the fixing of that transition in lean and muscular language.

In This Once we encounter New York phenomenological report & Objectivist sincerity side by side with what would later be dubbed by Gitin's contemporaries (like friend Silliman) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=U=E writing. For instance, see the incredible "Careens," which places Gitin squarely in the company of Clark Coolidge and Jackson MacLow:

pump wob humus joint lock
Greek heels reef une sine
glisten twice

suff ackmo drabboard lathe
invi ocku mirror
etherweave tab vour itch

abit gany sud busi
prink tort ass brandy
mity go narm otli eft

bread inued ropin strike
shrive rup mediate
prim alk

("Careens"5)

Shorter work reminds one of Robert Grenier, Tom Raworth, the later Creeley...

The Pilgrim

walkin'

contra

diction

Add to that the linguistic grace of a Chinese brush painting:

two horses

  chew the sun
            bleached grass
                      and lope
                                volumes of air away

("Dreamtrack")

And you have a major voice doing the work that had to be done c. 1965-1978. In fact, the obvious question is why is David Gitin not in any of the anthologies? We do not see him in the perfect-bound, career-making books put out by Norton or Sun & Moon, when God knows lots of less-talented voices find a home in them. In recent e-correspondence Mr. Gitin indicated that he had broken away from the language-oriented writers about twenty years ago to return to lapidary, Objectivist work and that this schism perhaps accounts for his absence. Still, in this writer's opinion, the material in This Once is strong enough to warrant his inclusion in any of the anthologies alluded to above, schism or not. Perhaps this oversight will be rectified by those who discover, or rather rediscover this book in the future. (Perhaps one of you, reading this right now, will help correct this unfortunate situation.)

Two later collections, Fire Dance, and the privately published Sunlight, do not quite reach the same level of accomplishment as This Once. Gitin seems to acknowledge this himself by reprinting some of his earlier work in Sunlight. Still, there are things of interest here. In Fire Dance we find:

the door
slopes of light

your body
a delay

in glass

("The Call" 2)

And the enigmatic, vaguely sinister "Leisure World," dedicated to Gitin's deceased father:

She drives by
on the overpass

as he stands
abandoned

on the highway
where his car

has failed.
No more roads.

There's the garden
ripe tomatoes

and wonderful
books keep coming in

at the library
by the beach

Sunlight gifts us with the concision of "Passing Through," a section of which I offer below.

sun rays
caught in our skins

tremble like snakes
and burst

horses through surf
and we ride

oh we ride

Where have you been, David Gitin? Where are you heading? Stay with us, friend, and give us more of your fine poems.

---

This Once; New & Selected Poems 1965-1978.
Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1979.
104 pages. $7.95.

Fire Dance
Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1989.
64 pages. No price.

Sunlight
Privately published, 1998.
Unpaginated.

 

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