'Art Is Distinction: Process Is Not Being'

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.” 

Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage. It entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. In one of his pamphlets, Milton refers to “quips and snapping adagies.” Erasmus published the first edition of his Adagia in 1500. It contained some eight-hundred sayings. Later editions totaled more than 4,100 entries. Charles Gullans (1929-93) titled one of his poems, collected in Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel and Co., 1990), “Adagia”:

 

"Stolid and literal, I take my stand.

Art is decision, not the chance, unplanned

Performance of a trivial vulgar act.

It is selection of the crucial fact.

Though brute particulars still litter sense,

Art’s the suppression of irrelevance.

Life is the constant pressure of the new,

But art, the final judgment of the true,

Measures resistance to inane distraction.

Art is the model of coherent action.

It is not my confusion or confession,

It’s not a gossip’s tale concerning me:

It is the meaning of my history.

It is constructed and can be construed

As proposition and as attitude.

Then art is structure: nothing can be said

Without the order in which it is read.

Art is technique, by which the masters say

That ends are realized in a métier.

Art is distinction: process is not being.

The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

 

Gullans was composing an apologia for his practice of poetry. Some readers will recognize the spirit of Yvor Winters, with whom Gullans studied at Stanford. There are obvious swipes at so-called “Confessional” poetry and sloppy, sentimental free verse in general. In a 1954 letter to Gullans, Winters wrote:

 

“There are two views of the principles which I have taught you kids: (1) they are correct, in which case they are not my property but are universals and are in the public domain, for anybody to use who has the talent to use them; (2) they are wrong, in which case it is up to you to work out something better.”

 

Gullans dedicated his first collection, Arrivals & Departures (University of Minnesota Press, 1962) to Winters (“magister ludi”). The Bright Universe and Other Poems (Abattoir Editions, 1983) includes “In Memoriam: A.Y.W.,” dedicated to Winters’ widow, Janet Lewis:

 

“It is a smaller island now,

my Captain, that all sheets are set

to the constant gale that takes you,

bending like the pages of a book.

 

“Farewell, old Voyager, farewell

ever, aye, as your taut ship skims

the swift, dark torrent, ceaselessly

driven by your hard argument

 

“onwards through foam, to continents

unmapped, wherever shelved and shoaled,

whatever reefs guard the smooth, blue

passages to land, if rudder,

 

“sextant, star, and compass be true.”

 

Winters died in 1968. His given name was Arthur Yvor Winters. Go here to read eulogies for Gullans after his death, including those by friends and fellow poets R.L. Barth, Turner Cassity and Timothy Steele.

 

[The quoted letter can be found in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]