post-conference; Nathaniel Mackey: Splay Anthem

[The panelists: L–R, Eric Murphy Selinger, Yr Humble Blogger, Peter O'Leary, Joel Bettridge]

Returned yesterday from the Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900, anxious a little to be back in south Florida's warmth, more than a little weary after 2 1/2 days of nonstop socializing, polite listening, & – well, partying: in short, conferencing. The Ronald Johnson panel organized by old friend & co-conspirator Eric Selinger went off well: Joel Bettridge presented an overview of the forthcoming Bettridge/Selinger-edited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works; Peter O'Leary read a goodly and riveting portion of his memoir of being mentored by Ron in the art of poetry; Eric gave a lovely account of his quarter-long experiment of guiding a class of students thru the implications of a two-line Johnson poem, something between collaborative "thick description" and Holmesian sleuthing; & I tossed out some piffle about anagrams. (Ask me why "love" is like a "vole" sometime.)

The picture above captures the panel in full glory: Peter in characteristic towering handsomeness; Joel doing a imitation of Lou Reed imitating Brad Pitt; Eric with an intimidating growth of Absalomian curls; me – er, I suppose every 4-piece ensemble needs the homely drummer to make the front men look better. Anyway, it was fun.

There was much more on offer: formal presentations by a range of smart & diverting people – Kristen Prevallet, Tom Orange, Robert Zamsky, Norman ("not that NF") Finkelstein, among many others – and a keynote address by Aldon Nielsen which featured video of Nathaniel Mackey accepting his National Book Award & Jacques Derrida visiting Nelson Mandela's cell & photos of Derrida dueting with Ornette Coleman. Deconstruction, whether adumbrated by M. Derrida or the fantastic African American poet Russell Atkins, may never be the same.

[The Poets: L-R, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donohue, Tyrone Williams]

The main attraction poetry-wise was a reading by Nathaniel Mackey Friday afternoon: as usual, a riveting event, tho marred by the facts that a) Nate's presentational style is a very definitely low-key affair – ie, he does not project, nor does he try to, and b) for some reason, the auditorium did not have a microphone that could reliably pick up his voice, which would have been okay but that c) the damned heating system in the room kept cutting on and drowning out the low subtle bits for the folks in the back rows. But as usually for Mackey, an excellent reading.

Reprised in part at a Saturday night party at Alan Golding & Lisa Shapiro's, where Nate read another section from Bass Cathedral, among a cloud of other poets (too many to name). A great party, followed by a night of carousing in good company (which of course followed two other nights of the same). (Needless to say, I slept on the plane home, when I wasn't reading Paul Auster's – possibly sleep-inducing – The Brooklyn Follies.)

A definite recharging of the batteries, both intellectually & socially. I haven't been to a conference in some time where there was such a concentration of alt-poetry scholarship & talent. But Nate Mackey – that reminds me:
***
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey (New Directions, 2006)

[6/100]

I've been following the nomadic wanderings of Nathaniel Mackey's sequences "Mu" and Song of the Andoumboulou for a couple of decades now, thru his first three volumes of poetry – Eroding Witness, School of Udhra, & Whatsaid Serif – watching as they've circled around one another, coiled, braided, & finally, in this magnificent latest volume, virtually merged. I'll admit I've put off reading Splay Anthem for some months, for wholly selfish reasons: Mackey's simply so good, the dense and tasty music of his verse so entrancing, his play with pun & anagram so fertile, that whenever I spend time with one of his books I find myself irresistibly drawn to slavish (& mawkishly inferior) imitation. Like School of Udhra & Whatsaid Serif, much of the early part of Splay Anthem follows its speaker(s) thru a dreamlike, surreal, cross-cultural pilgrimage, always surprising, always lively. It's grand & lovely & consistently unexpected – rather like being astonished by what Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell will come up with next on the Mu albums that are one of "Mu"'s referents. The real surprise in Splay Anthem, however, is the horrid spiritual & geopolitical stasis of the final section, "Nub" – "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become," Mackey writes – one of the most impressive & horrifying visions of George Bush's American one could imagine.

airborne

Leaving at the crack of dawn for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 – a mouthful that; a mark of my own age that I remember when it was merely the "Twentieth-Century Literature Conference" – to talk about Ronald Johnson and anagrams, & to spend some time in deep discussion with old friends & new. I quite frankly love conferences (except for MLA – everybody hates MLA): staying in a posh hotel, eating foods one wouldn't normally allow oneself, drinking & smoking way too much.

Best of all is the sense one sometimes gets of a kind of concentrated attention being paid to the things one cares about, one's "discipline." It happens in flashes in the department halls of Our Fair University, but all too rarely. Sadly enough, one finds one shifting from graduate school – a non-stop carnival of intellectual stimulation, of new books & ideas & movies & so forth (along with a great deal of angst, of course) – to a situation in which talking about poetry has become a job, & conversations with your colleagues seem to be about 50% bourgeoise housekeeping (the state of one's home, the progress of one's kids, which restaurants one should visit), 20% teaching "shop talk," 20% full-bore office politics & administrative kvetching, & a bare 10% ideas. At the best conferences, it's ideas most of the time.

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes," said Thoreau. But I've disregarded Walden & togged myself out in some new pants & couple of new sweaters, in eager anticipation of the sub-freezing weather predicted for points north. (My Chicago friends will snort derisively to learn that our current "cold front" has temperatures down to 66 at night.)

So here's to getting airborne!

Robert Duncan: Roots and Branches

[5/100]

Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan (1964; New Directions, 1967)

Looking back at my poems a couple years ago, I was astonished at how deeply my own modes & formal conceptions had been shaped by an early reading of Duncan's late work – from Bending the Bow forward, especially the sequence "Passages." Surprising then it's taken me so long to make my way – after many abortive starts, much reading here & there – completely thru Roots and Branches. So much that puts me – reticent, Protestant, skeptical, puritanical (?) – off: the operatic emotionalism, the wide-eyed mysticism, the persistent play with theosophical themes. All of which, to other eyes, could be seen as among the very glories of RD's poetry. I'm still divided, but find it impossible to gainsay the vatic power of the verse, the continual sense of a keen mind striving at questions on the very verge of knowledge, the exquisite modulations of a Romantic lyric voice almost unsurpassed in the 20th century.

submerged

Bouts of drenching rain the past few days – nice for the plants ("Florida, venereal soil" – Stevens) but nail-biting for us, as the roof's a sieve of yet-to-be-repaired holes. After a weekend of epic scribbling, I have a draft of this week's conference paper. Terrified to look at it & realize what a farrago of half-digested thises & thats it might be: a bit of Cratylus, leg of Saussure, dashes of Puttenham Dryden & Addison, smidgens of JH Prynne & RW Emerson – that sort of paper.

Now back to the "real" world, where quotidian responsibilities have piled up over my dizzy head: 31 chapters of 1 Samuel to read, stacks of student sonnets to address, mid-terms in a blue-book'd stack on the bar ("mark me, mark me!" they cry, like the marks in Blake's "London"), & off in the not-so-distant future, a half-dozen pieces I've committed to write over the next half-year. And I need to get a haircut in some interstice of time over the next three days, & buy some new clothes so that I don't slouch the corridors of conference-land in the same drab & awful uniform I've worn for the last decade.

(Unhelpful that we've been having the floor in the "spare" bedroom – formerly D.'s bedroom, now officially the playroom – redone, so that every corner of the upstairs is cramm'd with toys & furniture & stacks of children's reading material. My toes black with late night stubs.)

Is It Still Cool To Like Radiohead?

Who cares? Me, I'm stoked – yesterday I managed to get advance sale tickets to the first show of their 2008 tour, just up the road in West Palm Beach.

tweak

I replaced the snazzy Skia typeface of the blog with Hoefler Text, which is rather more traditionally "bookish," with all the serifs & little paradiddles that supposedly make a typeface more readable. I may go back to Skia, which I like very much.

Trimming Boswell

It was only at the last minute that I decided the Biography seminar ought to be actually reading Boswell, rather than just talking around him – a biography course without Boswell like a modern poetry course without Pound (oh yeah, like the one Wyatt Prunty taught when I was an undergrad). But golly, he's so long: the RW Chapman Oxford World's Classics I have clocks in a bit over 1500 pages. After much mousing around, I discovered that the only complete Boswell on the internet had only been scanned thru about 1773, with great chunks still to go.

So, with about a week & a half to spare before the beginning of the semester, I put in an order for the most readily available Penguin abridgment, edited by Christopher Hibbert. I have a constitutional antipathy to assigning abridged texts, but this one isn't bad: Hibbert trims the loquacious Scot down to about 350 pages, in large part by savagely cutting all of the letters Boswell includes. There's also a lively introduction & some (not enough) explanatory notes at the end.

Examining the two books side by side, I'm struck by the judiciousness of Hibbert's abridging: he's not just cutting pages & paragraphs, but even extraneous sentences within paragraphs. Makes for a much tighter read – even gives it something approaching biographical form.

But then again, we don't read Boswell for form, do we? We don't even really read him for story. After all, the Great Cham (or as I call him in my more bilious moments, the Fat Bastard) got born at the beginning, & is going to die at the end. If we want Johnson's life as a psychological progression, we read Walter Jackson Bate; if we want a judicious assessment of his literary career & importance, we read Robert DeMaria. We read Boswell, first & last, for the anecdotes & the conversation. And it pains me find some of my faves missing from Hibbert's Boswell. The abridged Boswell – any abridged Boswell – is like ordering your favorite stiff drink & finding the bartender's shorted you on the liquor.

Rae Armantrout: Next Life

[4/100]

Next Life, Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan UP, 2007)

Poems so spare & taut one is afraid at first glance they'll evaporate from the page. but then, as one finds oneself caught in the double imperative to read onward, to find out what comes next, and at the same time to read more & more slowly, so achingly slowly that the lines might as it were slow down & run backwards, the incredible strength & cunning of Armantrouts's work becomes evident: the unfailing keen eye for the quotidian detail, the steel architecture of dizzyingly precise syntax. The poems are all bones, sinews, & corded muscle, spare machines of observation & groping, musical thought.

talk angst

I'm off to a conference week after next – Louisville, in case you're interested; say hi, let's have a drink, etc. – & am going thru my usual "conference-in-12-days & I-haven't-written-the-paper" meltdown. Some people can talk from notes or an outline; some people, heroic adventurers, can improvise something worthwhile on the spot. Not me: I need a full-blown script. If I have a script, I can ad-lib a bit, I can insert the odd joke or dance move – but without a script, I'm dead meat.

I may have been scarified by a performance I witnessed many MLAs ago, when a guy my age, one of the most brilliant scholars of contemporary poetry I know, absolutely melted down into a puddle of embarrassed incoherence as he tried to improvise a talk from a handful of pages of notes. (Yes, Hugh Kenner I'm told regularly used to improvise his talks from notecards, but that falls in the "don't try this at home, kids" category.) Or I've been disgusted by big-name, big-bucks academic speakers who thought that they could bullshit their way thru their 40 minutes, take the check & go home, as if every disconnected observation that fell from their lips would somehow turn into gold before it hit our ears. So me, I stick to the script.

There're problems with the paper-delivery model of academic gatherings, I know. And I applaud meetings like the Shakespeare Association of America & the Modernist Studies Association, in which most of the meetings are gatherings to discuss papers that have already been shared among the participants – something more along the lines of what the hard scientists do, I believe. And I even have some admiration for the notion that Fritz Senn, the grand old man of Joyce criticism, has been promulgating for some time: that there's no point in hearing something we could read: instead, we need to see scholars thinking on their feet, improvising. Problem is, when I've heard Joyceans take up Senn's gauntlet & improvise their talks, most of the time the results are pretty incoherent, unimpressive.

I could probably fly up to Kentucky with the pages & pages of notes I have & talk thru something that my 4 auditors would find interesting, I guess. Or I could make a jackass of myself, as I tend to do whenever I don't have enough notes for my classes. Maybe I'm just feeling discouraged because of the general tepidness of my courses this semester. Getting tired of the sound of my own voice.

time wasters

So I got addicted to LibraryThing some months ago – addicted enough to be maybe halfway thru cataloging my entire book collection. It's a lovely website, & seemed to answer all my desires for an application that would help me sort out & assess all those shelves of (mostly unread) books. I was only mildly interested in its social applications – the fact that you can be "friends" with other LibraryThingers & exchange comments & queries & so forth.

But then that delightful madman Bill Keckler sucked me into GoodReads, which is something else altogether: Facebook or MySpace for book-heads. Here the emphasis is very heartily & heavily on the social aspects of bookreading & collecting. It's all fascinating, & great fun. I'm collecting "friends" like a south Florida yenta at the Swap Shop! Now maybe I should make a stab at actually reading some books...

Halsey & Mac Cormack: Fit to Print

[3/100]

Fit to Print, Alan Halsey & Karen Mac Cormack (Coach House / West House, 1998)

A transatlantic collaboration between an English (AH) & an Anglo-Canadian (KM) poet, Fit to Print takes the newspaper – its squished columns, its typos, its sometimes hilarious juxtapositions – as formal inspiration. All great fun, particularly in tracking Halsey & Mac Cormack's thefts & plunderings from the daily repository of pathos & inanity, tho the 2-columned form in which the book is set (appropriately enough) sometimes makes my eyes wuzz. I give the edge to Halsey's contributions, if only because I find his whimsy a trifle more congenial than what sometimes seems too earnest in Mac Cormack's pages, but I respect her keen eye for the economic & political implications of the Globe & Mail's quotidian cubist epic.

I begin to worry

Only four weeks or so in to the semester, & for some reason the classes are already showing signs of mid-semester fatigue. Me too, maybe. The Biography seminar last night – Johnson's life of Milton, Rambler #60, Idler #84 – left me weary: I had things to say (rarely at a loss for words, even if they don't happen to be relevant ones); the guy presenting on Johnson had lots to say; everybody else was in a thoughtful listening mode. Which I'm hard put to interpret: we haven't done the reading? we've done the reading but found it boring as hell? where's the beef?

But a bit of fun: visited a colleague's class as show 'n' tell display: Actual Living Poet – read his pomes & ask him questions about 'em. My fave the old chestnut, "Do you write with a pencil or a pen or on a word processor?" No, I write with my hearrrrt.

Laynie Browne: Rebecca Letters

[2/100]

Rebecca Letters, Laynie Browne (Kelsey St. Press, 1997)

Three longish sequences, mostly – tho not strictly – prose poetry. A comfortable word order & syntax; these are for the most part standard sentences, save for the sorts of fragments one familiarly encounters in semi-formal writing ("The story of the ghost. The story of Rebecca."). The title sequence, "Rebecca Letters," is the longest & most striking, hovering around the Rebecca Browne (the poet's great-grandmother?) whose 1898 photograph appears on the cover. A dream of an "other history," a dream of language in which undefined "he"s, "you"s, & "she"s move on the fringes of consciousness. The shock of strangeness in the individual lexical choices ("curling circlets of rain") and in the movement from sentence to sentence, sometimes accretive, logical, sometimes sharply disjunctive. "A Sliding ontology." A dream of recovering the past, recovering memory, "a web to be reunited": "Is there a dependable urn into which I might deposit the results of all that has been burned?" An insinuative art too subtle to be summarized.

Ed Roberson: Atmosphere Conditions

[1/100]

Atmosphere Conditions, Ed Roberson (Sun & Moon, 2000)

I've got a small stack of Roberson I've been meaning to dive into, but this is the first of his "mature" volumes I've read. A lovely, very moving book. The delicate, energetic tracing of thought – tentative & recursive – social & political anomie, sensual longing, the complexities of musical & cultural lineages: all played out in precise, thoughtful, flexible forms. Begins with Olsonian meanderings, perhaps too tentative to "grab" overtly, but grows more & more powerful as it proceeds, until you close the thing wanting immediately to start all over again.

This is the first of my "100 poem-books" posts; hopefully it won't descend into mere blurb-writing. If you want your book or your friend's book to appear in the series, feel free to zap me a copy.

poll

The political blogosphere is so huge & vibrant that I don't usually care to get much involved, unlike my colleagues over at Incertus. But a brief appeal to "local" – read Florida – readers: get out tomorrow & vote. If you're a Republican, of course you'll be out there. But even registered Democrats & left-leaning Independents ought to be at the polling stations.

It's true that the national Democratic Party is still asserting that Florida delegates won't count at the national convention, since the (Republican-controlled) state legislature moved the state's primary up without party permission. So a vote for Obama or Clinton or Edwards might or might not end up "counting" (whether a vote in Florida ends up counting anyway is an open question, at least since 2000.)

But a proximately more important item on the ballot is Constitutional Amendment 1, a beginning at property tax reform. Now it's true that the revenue situation in Florida is deeply screwed up, & property owners & potential buyers bear a disproportionate tax burden. But this amendment is nothing more than a political band-aid whose immediate effects will be to worsen the never-ending fiscal crisis in the state's public sector – most notably, in public education and in public higher education (chronically underfunded, & spectacularly hamstrung by legislative micromanagement). For a stark, if somewhat overwrought, assessment of the whole business, see this editorial from Erin Belieu, a poet and member of the English faculty at Florida State. (Believe me, things are worse at Our Fair University.)

So get out & vote: whether or not you bother to pick a presidential candidate, vote "no" on Amendment 1.

monkey glands

So who's my intellectual hero, now that Guy Davenport's dead? Gotta be Jonathan Mayhew. I get a jittery shot of monkey glands every time I read Bemsha Swing, or at least get inspired to do something new. Right now Jonathan's kick-starting his novel-reading by blogging 100 novels – no particular list, no particular order, just whatever direction his nose takes him. So I'm going to play junior copy-cat, & see how long it takes me to blog 100 books of poetry. (Tag: 100 poem-books.) Like Jonathan, no rules, no lists, just whatever hits me; re-reads count, as do books I've been working at for months. It'll help clear out some of the vast "unread" shelves, at least.
***
Congratulations of the new-parental category to Tony Tost and Josh Corey. And a teeny bit of Schadenfreude: these poetically-prolific young sprouts'll never know what hit 'em.

choice item

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky makes the "Editors' Choice" list in today's New York Times Book Review.

Strachey on Johnson / Johnson on Milton

My biography seminar, which I had at first conceived as a wide-ranging, omnivorous kind of course that would seize and devour all sorts of texts, from Plutarch to Kitty Kelly, has ended up pivoting around a couple of historical moments: the Samuel Johnson/James Boswell nexus of the 18th century, & the Lytton Strachey/Virginia Woolf revolution of the 20th. And of course the fallout from those two moments.

Not that we'll be short of things to talk about. On the contrary, as I've been rereading Johnson & Boswell, I've gotten more & more tempted by the idea of a Johnson seminar one of these years. I'm simply fascinated by the guy – fascinated & repelled, of course: in order to find so many wrong-headed notions stuck in one genius brain you have to go to someone like Milton, or Pound, or – well – Shakespeare. I find Joyce & Zukofsky obsessively fascinating and intellectually congenial; Johnson, like the folks in the last sentence, I find obsessively fascinating & simultaneously repellent.

The 26-year-old Lytton Strachey reviewed a new edition of Lives of the Poets in 1906, & as always managed to get off a few zingers, like this one:

That the Lives continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself a high proof of the eminence of Johnson's intellect; because, as serious criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far removed from the futile. Johnson's aesthetic judgmenst are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them – except one: they are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that nobody minds.

Strachey, in proto-Eliotian fashion, chalks this all down to changes in literary fashion, or in "the mind of Europe": "Our judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different, but because our whole method of judging has changed."

A test case, then: Johnson's life of Milton. It's clear that the Doctor hates Milton with a fervent hatred. (I'm reminded of a particularly bitchy passage from Eliot's 1936 essay on Milton: "As a man, he is antipathetic. Either from the moralist's point of view, or from the theologian's point of view, or from the psychologist's point of view, or from that of the political philosopher, or judging by the ordinary standards of likeableness in human beings, Milton is unsatisfactory.") Johnson dislikes the fact that Milton belonged to no church; he complains that he treated the women in his life as "a Turk"; he loathes his Parliamentary politics, his "acrimonious and surly" republicanism. But what does Johnson have to say about the poetry? Is he truly "never right," or is Strachey just tossing off one of his inimitable generalizations?

It's a mixed score. Johnson is wrong to offhandedly dismiss all of the sonnets (he calls the heartbreaking "Methought I saw my late espouséd saint" a "poor sonnet"). To my mind, he's totally off his gourd in savaging "Lycidas" as "a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting." He gives Samson Agonistes much too short shrift, along with all the other brief poems.

But Johnson knew whereupon Milton's reputation would rest, & he knew that Paradise Lost was too grand an achievement ultimately to be undermined by any reservations he had about Milton's politics or personal life. And in the 18 pages he devotes to that epic, there aren't more than a couple of strictly aesthetic judgments with which I don't find myself agreeing. A few Johnsonian zingers:

The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but hsi natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required; but is his peculiar power to astonish.

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war in heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book, in which it is related, is, I believe, the favourite of children...

Observations such as these – and there are many more – pace Strachey, haven't aged in the last 230 years. What has gotten a bit stale, however, is the early 20th-century apotropaic reaction against Milton and the entire "grand" tradition in English verse. That moment has passed, along with TS Eliot & all his hegemonic house, in literary-critical circles; but far too many contemporary American poets still seem convinced that even a knowledge of Milton smacks too strongly of some kind of suspicious Anglophilia.

Heaven knows I don't want young poets to start writing like Milton (tho young critics could stand to learn a few things about sentence structure and rhetoric from Johnson); but I do hanker for a bit more of the elevated style in contemporary verse.

Burt Hatlen, 1936–2008

[The "Tributes to Zukofsky" panel, Orono, summer 2004; L-R: Theodore Enslin, Robert Creeley, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Burt Hatlen]

The girls, tho 2 years apart, are – as Pippa likes to say – "half-twins," in that they share a birthday. There was a point when I was happy with this: think of all the energy & money we'd save on birthday parties! But that was not to be: they're 2 years apart, after all, & have different friends, different interests & likings, different obsessions. So instead, we're facing the annual discombobulation of two preschool birthday parties on successive weekends. Priez pour nous.
***
The weather is beautiful – warm during the day, chilly at night, little humidity; but a sad, gray time nonetheless. For me the week's been darkened by news of the death Monday of Burton Hatlen – as the obituaries point out, Professor of English at the University of Maine and Director of the National Poetry Foundation. It feels to me – and I know it feels likewise to many of my friends and colleagues – a particularly personal loss.

It's true that when Burt was a newly-minted English professor (he came to Orono, Maine in 1967) he encouraged, even was a mentor to, a wayward undergraduate named Stephen King; that fact's gotten him mentioned in every book about King I've turned over (there's even a photo of Burt in at least one of them). One could do worse, I suppose, than go down in literary history as a prime influence on one of the century's most commercially successful novelists.

But Burt was one of the quiet firesources of American poetry scholarship, particularly of modernist and late (or post-) modernist poetry – what I sometimes call "alt-poetry." Carroll F. Terrell had founded the National Poetry Foundation at U Maine in 1971, largely to disseminate Pound scholarship (NPF would launch Paideuma, its Pound journal, the next year). With Hatlen on board, the Foundation expanded its activities past the high-modernist figures it initially focused on – Pound, Eliot, Yeats – to become a first-choice outlet for scholarship on a wide range of twentieth-century poets. Every Zukofsky scholar knows the indispensible Terrell-edited volume Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet (1979), & NPF followed that one up with a whole series of "Man/Woman and Poet" collections: George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy, David Jones, etc. etc. The journal Sagetrieb was something of a "sequel" to Paideuma, publishing work on poets of a second modernist generation (like the Objectivists) & postwar, "postmodern" figures.

NPF was also printing valuable primary texts: Rakosi's collected prose and poetry; Jonathan Griffin's poems; Ron Silliman's big, eye-opening & (for many of us) mind-blowing In the American Tree (1986). (They're still at it, by the way – in recent years they've published important collections by Theodore Enslin, Armand Schwerner, Helen Adam, Joanne Kyger, & Kenneth Fearing.)

And then there were the conferences, every three or four summers. I gather they began as celebrations of particular poets – Pound, Yeats, etc. – but by the time I started visiting Orono they were decade-themed (poetry of the 1930s, of the 1940s, & so forth). It was like a kind of wonderful poetry summer camp – a three- or four-day conference in isolated campus setting, where every panel was on poetry, where everywhere you turned you were running into someone you actually wanted to talk to. (Think of it as the anti-MLA.) So many fantastic intellectual exchanges, so many grand and moving readings.

By the time I started going to Orono, Terry Terrell had handed the directorship of the NPF over the Burt, & Burt was the moving force behind the Foundation's publications and the summer conferences. (I suspect that there was a good deal of Stephen King's money being funneled into the organization, as well: King has always been outspoken about his debt to Burt for early encouragement.) Somehow Burt managed – on whatever shoestring of a budget – to keep this three-ring circus of journals, book series, and conferences going, & made Orono the hottest ticket in contemporary poetry studies. At the same time, he managed to keep up a steady stream of his own scholarship, an essay or two every year, always lucid, intelligent, & fundamentally solid work. I don't know whether he ever thought to collect those essays – I learn to my astonishment he published over a hundred – but he never came out with a book. Perhaps he was just too busy fostering others' scholarship, promoting poetry, & learning from others to give much thought to promoting his own work.

I met Burt at the Louisville 20th-century literature conference in 1992. I felt very much a kid – I was still in my 20s, I was delivering my first conference paper ever (on LZ and Stevens), & out there in the (admittedly sparse) audience were two scholars I admired just this side of idolatry: Jerome McGann and Peter Quartermain. Sitting with them was a hulking, Johnsonian figure. I invoke Dr Johnson, frankly, out of affection, for there was something of Johnson's imposing bulk, his awkwardness & tics, & his fundamental seriousness about Burt (yes, it was he), who came up to me after the panel and asked "Can I have your paper for Sagetrieb?"

Over the years I learned that Burt had performed similar acts of professional kindness to any number of young scholars (see here for Norman's experience). He published my Stevens/Zukofsky paper in Sagetrieb, & published several book reviews subsequently. He was enormously supportive when I was editing Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, a collection that mostly drew upon papers delivered at a 1993 Orono conference. And over the 16 years I knew him, I was always astonished to find that he was following my work and my career with a touching avuncular interest. Indeed, even as I write this, I realize that Burt is one of the few people in the academy that I've looked to over the years as a mentor. He will be much missed. I will miss him very much.

14.5 minutes & counting

The heady excitement of appearing in the Times Book Review is slowly abating. I sense that I'm in the last half-minute or so of my Warholian 15 minutes. Not that it made much difference in the way we conducted our weekend, save for the Sunday morning trip to the supermarket, where I took P. to the newspaper stand & subtly but ostentatiously bought a pile of Sunday Timeses, flipping thru & saying loudly, "look, honey, there's Daddy's book." As yet, there's been no phone call to join the staff of Poetry or The New Yorker, tho a couple of nice reviewing assignments have dropped into my lap.

Many – many – thanks to everybody who left their congratulations in the comments box (or who backchanneled). It really does mean a lot to me. The inevitable comment, however, was that Dan Chiasson's generous piece had quite a lot to say about Louis Zukofsky but not a hell of a lot to say about The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (still available from Amazon.com – link at left – tho most of the really cheap "new & used" copies have disappeared – but still a steal at $19.80). I of course am not complaining: he said the book was "terrific," & that's an adjective I can live with (right up there with "definitive," "brilliant," "indispensible" etc. – future reviewers take note).

But that's the way of the world for reviews of biographies, isn't it? In the first pages of Reflections on Biography (OUP 1999, still one of the very few semi-rigorous studies of the form), Paula Backscheider recalls her disappointment at reading review after review of her Daniel Defoe: His Life that "narrate[d] pieces of Defoe's exciting life" without commenting on how Backscheider had opted to present that life, the principles of research, selection, and presentation that made the biography what it was.

It's inevitable that this will be especially the case in reviewing the biography of a figure like Zukofsky, whom the average NYTBR reader probably knows only by name (as late as 1992 or so, one of the most prominent American studies people at Harvard, in conversation with me over dinner, revealed that he didn't really know the difference between LZ & Charles Bukowski – "he's really big in Germany, isn't he?") or by reputation, as Mr. Über-obscurity of modernist poetry.

And that's where I think Chiasson's review really shines: he acknowledges the "difficulty" for which LZ's work is famous, starting out by quoting Hugh Kenner on "A" as "The most hermetic poem in English,” a “long intent eccentric unread game.” But then he turns that on its head, & makes an argument for LZ as of all things an intensely personal poet, a poet who ought to be of interest to readers of Henry Adams, Henry James, perhaps even of Robert Lowell. I think it's a canny move indeed, particularly pitched for a particular readership – but a very large readership indeed.

And it's not a false move: despite Chiasson's move (a move that will no doubt irritate some) to wrest LZ away from the baleful clutches of the Language Poets – remember, some of the few American readers who could spell his name correctly thru most of the 1970s & 80s – the "personal" LZ Chiasson describes does not falsify or reduce Zukofsky, but presents one of his several faces – the one most likely to appeal to NYTBR readers.

In this, it's a fruitful contrast to William Logan's mean-spirited review (in the same issue) of Geoffrey Hill's magnificent A Treatise of Civil Power, which castigates Hill for his "difficulty," and complains that "without explication, a poem like Hill’s is hardly a poem, just language at war with itself."* Logan seems to want an immediately accessible poetry of sensitive description: anything beyond that – probings into history, philosophy, etymology – is pretention and kerfluffle. Chiasson acknowledges that Zukofsky is more complex, more challenging than the books the Pitt Poetry Series was publishing thru the 1980s: but then he invites, encourages, nay bids readers to plunge in and find the "human values" in the man's work. And that's fine with me.

And I still like that word "terrific."

*And of course Logan can't resist getting some parting shots in at what for my money are still Hill's finest two collections, The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech!, which he dismisses as "caterwauling," the products of Hill's "course of antidepressants"; clearly he prefers his poets unmedicatedly depressed.