Jarrett Moran

Guy Davenport’s 1978 essay on literary anecdote, “Seeing Shelley Plain,” draws from Davenport’s extensive knowledge of the genre and his own contributions to it - for example, the time he assisted in extinguishing Sartre’s jacket pocket (“Monsieur, vous brûlez”). Rereading the essay last week, I ground to a halt, laughed disbelievingly, and texted Nozlee in all caps about the presence of a poet not mentioned in the essay or in any writing I’m aware of by Davenport.

On the difficulty of prying insight into a poem from the prosaic life of the poet, Davenport remarks, “Talk about pitching mercury with a fork!” He is remembering Richard Brautigan’s poem “Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork”:

Loading mercury with a pitchfork

your truck is almost full. The neighbors

take a certain pride in you. They

     stand around watching.

Even for as omnivorous a reader as Davenport, the knowing allusion to Brautigan seems out of place. Would Davenport have expected his reader to pick up on the reference? Is he really throwing this implicit homage to Brautigan amongst anecdotes about Eliot, Frost, and Pound? I’m reading from the collection The Geography of Imagination, in which Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound appear as (at the time) living paragons of American poetry, alongside various associates of Black Mountain College.

Brautigan is decidedly more Haight-Ashbury than Black Mountain, a side of twentieth century letters Davenport refers to with disdain in a list of “jaded old fools” from his short story “The Bicycle Rider”: “Aldous Huxley, a giggling British neurotic, moral idiots like Burroughs and the poet Ginsberg, and the shit-for-brains Timothy Leary.” By the seventies, Brautigan already sounded dated, though the collection Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork wasn’t published until 1976. All of this makes the poem an unlikely echo to hear in “Seeing Shelley Plain.” Then again, revising received opinions about poets is a theme of Davenport’s essay, and it sent me looking for my high school copy of Brautigan.