Paul Metcalf was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose. Devoted admirers included Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His books include Will West, Genoa, Patagoni, Apalache, The Middle Passage, Zip Odes, and U.S. Dept. of the Interior. He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.
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, but soon Metcalf began pushing past such conventions. His novel Genoa, subtitled "A Telling of Wonders," is a portrait of two 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, for instance, and especially by Apalache, 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, a documentary history of the Potomac River, and other works such as U.S. Dept. of the Interior and I-57, continue Metcalf's preoccupation with "juxtaposition" and documentary forms. Other Metcalf works include The Island, Golden Delicious, and Huascaran. In describing his technique, Metcalf uses the word "juxtaposition": the union of seemingly disparate or disjointed elements. These elements, what the 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, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson.
