ny introduction to Scott Greer must brave great leaps across American intellectual tradition because of the astounding intellect that propelled him with insight, rage and compassion through a profoundly violent century.
I have selected poetry spanning 55 years work of a young poet from West Texas, a pacifist in World War II, a young social theoretician who said I should like to consider myself an anarchist but I cant figure out how to work at it. (Letter of John Gould Fletcher,11/14/49)
There is a story that Greer, living as a working poet/editor in the 1940s, hitched to Los Angeles, listened through an open window to a lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles and enrolled as a graduate student in Sociology, a new field taking root in universities.
This poet about whom John Gould Fletcher, in a 1944 letter to James Franklin Lewis, said I believe he has in him more possibilities than any poet I know is most widely ready today as an urban sociologist. (Selected Bibliography, pg. 355)
Greer traveled, lectured and maintained homes in Milwaukee and London. Along with his wife, sociologist Ann Lennarson Greer, he designed free and unconventional educational programs for son, Scott Edward Lennarson Greer, whose intellectual gifts are much like his fathers.
Greer was cautious about claiming this intellectual power, I do not care to be designated a geniusnot anybodys conception of genius. There may be a time when genius comes upon me (I know what Blake meant when he said, I didn't write them, God did,) but there are certainly other times when genius is not upon me. But humanity is always there. It is myself, and it is greater than genius. (Letter to Jusdon Crews, 4/5/44)
Greer grew up during the Depression in Sweetwater, Texas. His mother was born in the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. We have no knowledge of our family beyond: on my fathers side, my great-grandfather who worked another mans Tennessee farm all day and cleared him a five-hundred- acre plantation by moonlight; a grandfather who was a landowner and cabinetmaker, horseshoer, dipsomaniac, stricken with a brain lesion; and my father, who came on west to Texas to live through the big Depression, with much effort. On my mothers side a Choctaw strain strong in my maternal grandmother; maternal grandfather a tin-horn illiterate gambler, dipso, died of cancer had the reputation of being the smartest man about book-larnin in Oklahoma, considering he couldnt read. (Letter to John Gould Fletcher, 9/2/43)
In the early 1940s at Baylor University, he worked first in a factory and then in the mental ward of the Veterans Hospital to pay for his own tuition and that of younger sister, Joy. At the same time, he edited (often remarking in letters how frantic and exhausting a schedule he kept) a literary journal entitled Crescendo A Laboratory for Young America, which counted among its contributors Judson Crews, Henry Miller, and Octavio Paz. And while, as Greer stated in the mission statement of the publication, Crescendo was not voice of a School, it did take a blatant anti-war stand and set forth a vision of literature as the voice and soul of a culture its teacher, conscience and mentor.
Greer used crescendo (great booming gongs. . . dense jungle rhythms. . . weird archangelic piping, grunting and hissing. . . ) as a central metaphor in the poem Black Cypress (1944) which described the raucous, loud and destructive settling of the West: the rough procession followed, growing in noises, crescendoed to thunder, trees crumbling to cabins, the land sweeping clean to the great fields and brown rolling slopes of this Texas. Its a poem full of images of civilization cities, culture, then war juxtaposed against the silent grace of the Indians and of the greening of the earth. The black cypress and water are witnesses to all that has gone before. The poem is very nearly a symbolic outline of the poets lifework.
To understand the work and the person, it is necessary to realize that the art and the science Scott Greer created were the product of fluid thinking, multidimensional analysis informed by voraciously acquired knowledge, passionate exploration of multiple levels of experience, cross-access to both sides of the brain, originality at any level a remarkable intellect. A flood of ideas, art, analysis poured out of him. He thought and wrote quickly in all directions, changed his mind and his life dramatically, and essentially survived this storm of inner life in the person of a charming, brainy poet/professor, a Texas exile in the irrevocable Midwest. (On Leaving West Texas, p. 73) The Christian Science Monitor once dubbed him the Tabasco-tongued sociologist from Northwestern University. (3/10/70)
Greers Crescendo A Laboratory for Young America was modeled after a group of writers who had come to be designated the Young America movement in the second decade of the century Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Randolph Bourne. Greer was deeply impressed by the writings of Bourne, a pacifist who in 1918 argued that America was a young country whose eclectic ethnic culture ought to present the world with an alternative to European barbarism.
The war has brought an immense and terrifying inflation to the political sphere, so that for most people non-governmentalized activity has ceased almost to have significance . . . . Nowhere any clear sense of whither we were drifting or how our ideas and slogans squared with the facts. On the contrary an insensate scramble for action, a positive delight in throwing off the responsibility of thought . . . . The discovery of the sinister forces still at work in what we had thought was a slowly emancipating era has been left wholly unattended to in this country. (Randolph Bourne, A Letter to van Wyck Brooks: March 27, 1918. In Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice a Year 1938-48, edited by William Wasserstrom. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press: 3-7.)
Often Greer seems to be trying to understand war in animistic terms, beast-eating-beast, or as doctrine manifesting itself as bestiality, the bite of the fierce indomitable Protestant jaw in the flanks of protesting food (Jamaican Sheaf). Other times he envisions it as a horrific infernal machine. Finally he seems to come to the conclusion that he is an unequivocal objector to the use of force as a technique in human relations (Letter to Judson Crews, 10/11/48) which, although it leaves the problem of the root of war unanswered, provides a point from which to act.
In Greers poetry and in his academic life he blended aesthetic intelligence with logic in search of a useful intellectual approach, one capable of reform. In Crescendo he was inviting a deep consideration of the forces in world culture and in the human soul that allow brutality.
Greer was eighteen years old, a poet, hard at work, 1941, Waco, Texas I am fighting on a million fronts: The university, the professors, what they teach, the students, the mores and grades, and tuition; finances, the pressures; the job, the beastly attendants, the utterly helpless patients, the atmosphere out of Celine, writing, the magazine, and so on, so on. Excuse the self pity; but it will give you some idea. But anyway the world is so beautiful in the morning you could cry for the beauty of it. And the hospital the only beautiful human thing in Waco is the hospital plant and there we have those who cannot appreciate it. I stood today in the luxuriant green, the grey dawn, and watched the sun come up; and thought of the men whose entire lives, every day, every hour, are the white walls, the men in white, the white night, the fluorescent lights, the white sheets and the heavy deathly smell of urine and calamine lotion, filth and stale cigarette smoke. And outside the city, smoky and beautiful as a Mexican opal in the dawn dawn pluming up from behind the river smoke. (Letter to Judson Crews, 1941)
In the next five years he wrote prolifically and was constantly struggling to make a living. He reported in a letter to John Gould Fletcher that Dorothy Norman had accepted a group of his poems for a journal called Twice a Year. Many years later he happened into a secondhand book store, (it is said that he was unable to pass a bookstore without stopping to browse) found a retrospective edition of Twice a Year published in 1964, and gave it to his son saying, Keep this. It is important.
Dedicated to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, and rooted in the same intellectual tradition as Greers Crescendo, Twice a Year existed from 1938 (the beginning of W.W. II) to 1948 (the year the House Committee on Un-American Activities was formed). Its aim was to publish those writers, native and foreign, contemporary and classic, whose art might serve as a means of social transformation. (Wasserstrom, 1964).
The issue in which Greers poems appeared was a double issue Spring/Summer & Fall/Winter of 1945. It opened with a snow-covered forest photographed by Ansel Adams, followed by a Signal Corps photograph of Polish prisoners murdered in a concentration camp in Germany a few hours before the arrival of the Fourth Armored and 89th Infantry Division. Then followed an official Army report: Buchenwald Atrocities. Then documents: Woodrow Wilsons Fourteen Points, the Covenant of the League of Nations, The Atlantic Charter, Declarations by the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, The Moscow Conference, The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agreement, two speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than a dozen treaty conference transcripts, the Charter of the United Nations, a chapter about racial discrimination in America, a chapter about Employment, poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, Lewis Mumford and Scott Greer (among others), fiction by Hart Crane, excerpts from the Diary of John Quincy Adams, and a chapter entitled Civil Liberties and the Supreme Court.
Twice a Year was profound collision of culture and art and a turning point for Greer. It set out an aesthetic/cultural/political matrix that demanded a lifetime of work, teaching, reading, living.
A note at the front of the issue dramatizes the point Due to unavoidable delays in printing because of wartime conditions, this issue of Twice a Year was delayed in coming off the presses. The use of the Atomic Bomb, the entry of Russia into the war against Japan, the Potsdam Conference, and the end of the war with Japan have occurred since this issue went to press. Full documentation, for the record, will be included in the next issue.
Out of the shocking reality of his youth grew the man. In the poem Research Project, which is dedicated to William Stafford and is, in part, an apology for turning his attention away from art and to social science, Greer wrote:
His research is concerned with thermonuclear war;
His poems with what we have been, could be, are.
The poems in Cities of the Soul are arranged into sections that reflect stages of his intellectual and artistic journey. The sections of our selected works reflect this journey. The arrangement is essentially chronological, but not confined to time sequence. Each section contains an intellectual quatrain and the poetry it generated, introduced by excerpts from his letters, quotations or anecdotes, and is concluded by brief selections from his sociological writings.
These have been included in the spirit of Twice a Year, and Greers own Crescendo. They by no means represent, or try to, the breadth of Greers sociological work. They are presented as gates to welcome readers to approach the major issues of our time from both aesthetic and social science perspectives. We have included a selected bibliography of Greers published work for those who want to read further.
Finally, a note about the editorial design of Cities of the Soul. When I first saw a small selection of poems by Scott Greer, he was ill and, in fact, died six months after Ann Greer, Scott L. Greer and I began work on the book. The scope of the book expanded as we three pored through boxes of typescript, incredible poems which we thought were unpublished. Ann began to collect his letters. In one letter Fletcher spoke of Ode to Huitzlopochtli as the work of a strange and disturbing genius. (Letter to James Franklin Lewis, 4/26/44) We read letters collected from libraries all over the country, finding there seeds of poems, theoretical explorations and explanations of the dramatic changes in the poets life and art.
Ann Greer embarked on an extensive search through small press library archives for published poems. Eventually we had as many as three different versions of many of the poems. Which to use? I went back to the originals, weighed different versions, and selected the most profound or eloquent published version. Occasionally I reverted to an unpublished version if that was the most fluidly rhythmic take. I often had a choice of titles as well.
Greer was in the habit of capitalizing the first word of every line (more often than not), although early versions of many poems employed upper and lowercase typography. Because of the vast intellectual architecture of much of the work Greer's long, rhythmically complex verse sentences often stretch through multiple stanzas I choose to punctuate the entire manuscript using standard upper and lower case to help syntax flow clearly. First line capitals, we all concluded, stopped the flow of words mid-concept and resulted in visual and rhythmic distraction. Similarly, I wove the love poems into a cycle and called it To Ann, which was the original title of nearly every piece. Greer approved this arrangement of the love poems (with new titles) and was pleased with the intellectual divisions of the book. His family, my research editors, approved the changes in typography.
I have chosen to footnote the place(s) individual poems were published in order to share with readers the variety and the vigor of Greers literary publishing. Before the small press revival of the 1960s and throughout this movement from which Plain View Press has found direction, there has been an unrelenting stream of dedicated editors, artists and writers whose voice has been the best hope of humanity. In addition to the wide impact of Greer's sociological work, his poetry was in the mainstream of alternative literary publishing for four decades.
