Why am I so attracted to British poets these days? I’ve just gone thru binges of reading Geraldine Monk, John Wilkinson, & most recently Robert Sheppard, & am right now in the delighted middle of Alan Halsey’s Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005. Part of it I suspect is just unreconstructed anglophilia, of the sort that keeps me watching Monty Python & listening to the Watersons. But there’s also a different relationship to language, to history in these poets that I’m fascinated by.
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I learn from Henry Gould (I often learn from HG) that the Library of America has just put out a Hart Crane volume, edited by Langdon Hammer (fellow biographer – he of James Merrill; once we sat together on a panel in the strangest conference I’ve ever attended, smack in the middle of WCW’s Paterson – a strange event I’ll probably recount someday). Crane’s always been one of my blind spots – a poet I just don’t get, despite a semi-annual hauling down of my copy of Complete Poems & Selected Letters (ed. Brom Weber, in the old “Anchor Literary Library” edition, with HC staring balefully over a cigar on the cover) & a re-reading of "The Bridge" & whatever else catches my eye. Time for another try, I think.
By my count, Crane (born 1899) is the youngest of the modern poets to appear in the LOA’s flagship series (the others being Frost, Pound, Stevens, & Stein). It is of course high time for a real LZ volume – not to slight the selection Charles Bernstein did for the LOA’s “Poets Project,” but I worry that getting into the PP (nicely produced but all too short pocket-sized selecteds) is gonna become a de facto consolation prize for not getting a full treatment: We’ve recognized you, lad/lass (addressed to Yvor Winters, Muriel Rukeyser, LZ, etc.) – now fuck along & stop dreaming of those big black covers with their little redwhite&blue stripe. But when oh when will the WCW and Moore volumes arrive?
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Hugh Kenner once bitched that the LOA format was far inferior to that of the Pléiade, & he’s right: the books are too big, the gutter too narrow, not enough notes, covers easily stained etc. Shopping tip for Poundians: next time you’re in Rome, pick up the Mondadori Pléiade-style edition of I Cantos – translation by Mary de Rachewiltz, tons of notes in the back, & an English text that’s much better than the thing New Directions keeps tossing at us year after year.
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Clever but stupid. I’ve grown from being a brash, self-centered, clever but stupid young person to a timid, self-centered, clever but stupid greybeard, in whom a demon of wholly unwarranted ambition struggles with a torpid Oblomov who’d prefer to sit and read. (The Demon of Consumption – to eat books like deep-fried snacks.)
Why are so many academics unhappy?, asks J. “The best job in the world,” after all, once you factor out fiscal remuneration. It’s the element of self-examination, or an uglier gnawing spur “that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of Noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days.”
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Dave Parks weighs in with entry #2 on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
5 comments:
I Heart Hart.
"Voyages" is a masterpiece.
One of those poets that I can't quite decide whether I love them despite or because of their weaknesses. When he writes badly, he writes very bad indeed, but he writes less than others with the same affliction (Wordsworth, Eliot, Pound, etc).
Why are so many academics unhappy?, asks J. Better to reverse the question: why do so many Penserosi go into academia? Maybe because introspection, self-doubt, questioning of one's motives, etc., can be put to professional USE in this context, unlike so many others.
But hey, what do I know?
Eric (L'Allegro)
These Adorno pieces are a great way of learning something about a book I've no right to know anything about. I hope you'll keep whirling it around between you.
Josh -- I'm trying, I really am, & maybe getting somewhere this time...
Eric -- you are *sooo* frivolous! I prescribe a major dose of Adorno & Joshua Clover. (More Adorno soonish, Michael)
Peter -- you're right of course. The Poets Project is underwritten by a bequest from James Merrill, one of the many generous things he did for poetry (including directly underwriting the LOA Stevens volume), & the whole LOA operation is financed on a tottering scaffolding of sales, grants, & fund-raising efforts (I get a begging letter every couple of months).
And it's probably rather appropriate to hold off on full-scale LOA volumes until there's a certain distance from a writer's life, otherwise there will be things like an LOA Yvor Winters (no offence Bob) or Roethke. Frankly, tho, the LOA Philip Roth kind of burns me up -- an absurdly overrated writer, without even the figleaf of a Nobel that Bellow had... Where's the Library of America Santayana? or Royce? or even Edmund Wilson? I'd read any of those before Roth.
Oblomov,
You eat books like deep-fried snacks? It could be worse. For example, I eat deep fried snacks like deep-fried snacks.
B
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