reading list

When I did my own MFA back in the dark ages (late 80s), the workshop was a bare-boned affair: 8 or 9 students, a resident poet, and sometimes a bottle of wine. There was kind of a hermetic overall effect – one was sealed in this room (sometimes a classroom, sometimes the professor's office – they had really big offices at Cornell back in the day) with your own poems & those of your colleagues, the professor & the ghostly reputation of her or his work. I'm not sure that was a good effect, ultimately.

We were all reading a great deal of poetry on our own, of course, and for a semester or two some of us set up a reading group to discuss a contemporary poet every couple of weeks. But there was no sense of a shared vocabulary among the members of the workshop, so that one writer's obsession with Mary Oliver fell on deaf ears among those of us who hadn't read a word of Oliver's, while the marks in my poetry of my own growing absorption in Jabès and Michael Palmer struck many of my colleagues as something akin to Spicer's Martian transmissions.

When I started doing workshops at Our Fair University not all that many years ago, I think the overall ethos of creative writing programs had shifted away from a pure emphasis on student poems, & I was happy to go along with that shift & assign "outside" reading. At any rate, here's this semester's reading list – by no means everything worthy I've read recently, but a semi-random 8 books I've read this past year & found compelling (or even interestingly arguable):

Jenny Boully, The Body

Peter Cole, Things on Which I've Stumbled

C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming

Joseph Lease, Broken World

Cole Swensen, Ours

John Taggart, There Are Birds

Elizabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers

Scroggins on Gizzi & Armantrout

Everything seems to hit the shelves or the internets right at the end of summer, as the imminent classes are breathing down my proverbial neck. To wit: The latest issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review has just been printed, & my contributor's copies have hit the mailbox. What's in it for me, you ask, that I should plunk down my hard-earned $15?

Well, there's the typical sprinkling of interesting new poems (among them a major chunk of John Matthias); a memorial section to Isaac Meyers and Tom Disch; and the usual run of beautifully-edited essays & essay-reviews: Devin Johnston on Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta, Wes Davis on Robert Hass, Catherine Madsen on Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Matthias on his co-translator Marko Kraljevic [can't get those diacriticals...], Eric Murphy Selinger on Palestinian poets Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, and Taha Muhammad Ali, and yr. humble blogger on Peter Gizzi & Rae Armantrout. The piece is called "Dark Matters," and begins thus:

On the back cover of Some Values of Landscape and Weather, we're told that Peter Gizzi is "on the quixotic mission of recovering the lyric." While I had no idea we'd lost it, I suppose the blurbist has a point. Gizzi, who during the late 1980s and early 1990s co-edited the excellent and eclectic journal O-blék, writes within an avant-garde tradition that sometimes views melopoeia with suspicion, or else discounts it entirely. What place song in the ranks of savage, analytic parataxis?

Go forth and buy.

Summer's End (my novel problem)

It's not that summer ever really ends down here – today it was well over 90 out, with the humidity hovering in the sauna range, & it won't get any cooler, I'm afraid, until the last couple months of the year. Classes officially began this morning; my own classes start Tuesday. I've finally nailed down the syllabi, & have begun thinking about things to say for those oh-so-important first-impression first days. (Keeping in mind, of course, that probably 30% of those who are present the first day won't be there the 2nd, & there'll be a whole crop of late-adders who will miss whatever sparkling introduction I manage to cook up between now & then.)

So what did I do on my summer break? Well, we were away for almost 2 months – most of it in New York City, where I had lunch with a famous science fiction author, finally met the excellent Zach Barocas in the flesh, & saw a decent amount of theater. We spent the better part of a week in Tennessee visiting Mom, & a number of weekends on Fire Island, where I got bitten by lots of horseflies and not as many mosquitoes. (The mosquitoes on Fire Island, strangely enough, are slower & rather more stupid than the Florida variety, if one can talk of mosquito intelligence levels.)

And of course I read a lot of books. I read stacks & stacks of slim volumes of contemporary verse (some of which I've blogged, some of which I haven't gotten round to, some of which I won't – I've pretty much abandoned the notion of adding things I didn't really like to the "100 poem-books" project), but I also read a little bit of criticism, a soupçon of philosophy, & wow a bunch of novels. But when I think about it, I realize I'm reading novels all the time, really.

Of course I teach novels in my lit classes, so there's a certain number of books that I'm always working at because I know I'll be teaching them in an upcoming semester (or next week). But I enjoy fiction pretty deeply, & am pretty much in awe at the craft & sheer long-haul determination it takes to produce a full-length work. Why haven't I tried writing a novel, at least since I gave up my last abortive attempt maybe 9 years ago? I think it may be a combination of sheer lacks: a lack of imagination, for one thing – I just can't come up with people, characters who interest me as much as real human beings do, & I can't put them into situations that I find, on rereading, to be particularly interesting.

And then there's a lack of determined focus. I'm best at smallish, manageable projects: a long poem that can be broken down into modular parts, an essay, a book review. It still amazes me that I managed to finish the LZ biography, but I realize that I did it primarily as mosaic-work, a bit at a time, a detail here and a passage there. I certainly didn't sit down & write it from beginning to end. I'm not a big word-count person (like one old friend of mine who writes fantasy novels, who's just posted a truly eye-popping daily word-count on her Facebook page) – I'm ecstatic when I can squeeze out a thousand words in a day. While I'm in awe of Ulysses, perhaps what impresses me the most is that Joyce managed to write it in only seven years.

There're some novelists whose work makes me want to take up fiction again – folks whose novels make me say, "hey, with a bit of luck I could do something rather rather as good as that." (I won't name names, but Paul Auster springs to mind. And I like Auster. And I'm probably fooling myself.) Others – Joyce, Nabokov, Byatt – make me want to never put one fictive word next to another again, I'm so ashamed at their deftness.

Then there's teaching the damned things. A colleague's Fulbright this fall has bequeathed to me a 19th-century American novel course, which I'm pretty excited about – if only it weren't for the 2 or 3 thousand pages of 19th-c. fiction I have to read thru over the course of the semester. I've reread House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom's Cabin over the past few weeks. Very interesting books indeed, if in very different registers. I find myself interested in the issue of sentimentality – much on my mind since reading David Copperfield for the first time a bit earlier in the summer.

The sentimentality – the tears – are laid on heavily in each of the novels: if Dickens applies it with a palette knife, Hawthorne uses a mortarer's trowel, & Stowe a garden shovel. But Stowe crosses a line for some of us: as one of my colleagues told me earlier this year, "Oh, well, you teach Uncle Tom's Cabin for sociological or historical interest – not as literature."* And I suspect that line has less to do with tendentiousness than with sentimentality. Wondering how my students will take all that tear-jerking.

*Alas for me, I've become so invested in all sorts of approaches to literary texts that I can't for the life of me remember what pure "literary" value looks like anymore.

MS – a CHEAP date

Some of you might know that many years ago, before I found my true life-niche as a dilettante poetry-culture blogger, obscure-poet biographer, obsessive Facebook watcher, and (don't forget!) poet, I wrote a critical book on Louis Zukofsky: Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, published by the University of Alabama Press a bit over a decade ago in their very excellent "Modern and Contemporary Poetics" series.

Anyway, it's been deeply discounted as part of Press's "Recession Sale," I learn from Charles Bernstein's blog ("a bahh-gain," as they say down here in Boca), along with lots of cool things by folks like Ben Friedlander & Susan Schultz & Bill Lavender & Hank Lazer. So go buy a copy or three. (I promise, those of you who turned over The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, there's all sorts of stuff in the earlier book that didn't make it into the biography!)

Scroggins on Oppen

Amid much anticipation, the new (and rather vast) issue of Big Bridge has made its way online. Among all of the other riches is a "Garland for George Oppen" edited by Eric Hoffman. And there, among fascinating contributions by such star-power folks as Zach Barocas, Joseph Bradshaw, Stephen Cope, John Cunningham, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Grant Jenkins, Burt Kimmelman, Michael Kindellan, Jack Marshall, Peter Nicholls, Marjorie Perloff, Patrick Pritchett, Martin Jack Rosenblum, Bruce Ross-Smith, Anthony Rudolf, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, John Taggart, Henry Weinfield and Karl Young – phew! – are a couple of pieces by your humble blogger: a note on Oppen's "The Lighthouses" and a review of Peter Nicholls's excellent George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism.

home; Maxwell: Realm Sixty-Four; Raworth: Ace

So we're back, as of Monday night. No, the suitcases aren't really unpacked yet, & we're bracing for the various cartons of books & papers with which the UPS folks are pursuing us (including some stuff I really wish I'm packed in the luggage – sigh). The entire house seems to be carpeted with tiny plastic beads from some bean-bag animal that Panda (the cat) has hunted down & dismembered; we have yet to find the actual carcass, which is no doubt stashed deep under some piece of furniture. Interesting science experiments in the refrigerator.

J. arrives from a flying trip this morning to the library at Our Fair University with the heartening news that what used to be the atrium in which banks of computers were arranged (so that students can look up books or – more often – update their Facebook pages) is being converted into a large lounge, & what used to be the interlibrary loan office (so that faculty could order books for research) is being converted into – you guessed it – a Dunkin' Donuts. A Dunkin' Donuts. In the library.

***

Realm Sixty-Four, Kristi Maxwell (Ahsahta, 2007)

The photograph on the cover of Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four shows a hand reaching out over a white background, as if to move a chess-piece. But it’s a plastic hand, the hand not of a woman or man but of an automaton, like the clockwork chess-playing Turk immortalized in Poe’s sketch, the “puppet and the dwarf” alluded to in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Chess is the explicit subject of many of the poems of Realm Sixty-Four (the title refers of course to the squares of a chessboard), the thematic center of all of them.

Life is like chess (isn’t that banal?), one reflects, deep in a first reading of David Copperfield, with its repeated themes of unprepared infatuation, the “undisciplined heart.” The pieces’ moves, the basic rules – like the passional vocabulary of interpersonal relationships – are easy enough to learn, at least superficially. But the combinatory possibilities, as one grows older, plays the game more often, present themselves as increasingly rich, mysterious, complex. Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four is an arena in which love, sexuality, history & power are set out in the ever-shifting figures of the chessboard & its opposed, interlocked pieces. A rich & mysterious book.

[86/100]
***
Ace, Tom Raworth (Edge Books, 2001)

Vintage Raworth – circa 1973-4, that is – put back into print by the good offices of Rod Smith, whom I remember as the affable, enigmatic center of the DC poetry scene during my short time there in the early ‘90s. Where LZ’s one- or two-word lines slow the reader down, Raworth’s propel the reader forward, tripping from page to page, trying desperately to follow the quicksilver, evanescent shifts of voice & thought. Heady, fast.

[87/100]

Norman Finkelstein: Scribe

Scribe, Norman Finkelstein (Dos Madres, 2009)

Finkelstein’s last full-length volume, Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007), was something of a digression for those of us watching the growth & progression of his career, consisting as it did of poems for the most part composed before the 3 volumes of his simultaneously rich & spare sequence Track. Scribe, his first real post-Track collection, marks the moment when one can clearly begin setting Finkelstein in the same rank as his self-proclaimed masters, among them William Bronk, Robert Duncan, and Michael Palmer (who contributes a fine blurb). This is a volume for which blustery superlatives seem inappropriate, for the pleasures & mysteries of these poems are subtle, insinuative ones – the riddling, ritualistic anabasis of “Drones and Chants” (the volume’s first section), the quirky assemblages of “Collages, which draw on everything from fairy tales to Jewish mysticism to celtic ballads.

The real heart of the volume is the last section, “An Assembly,” a series of poems playing off of the architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977), something of a “generative grammar” for the design of humanized living spaces. Finkelstein takes Alexander’s descriptions of various habitant spheres – the marriage bed, the sidewalk café, the spiritual center – as jumping-off points for poems that are quiet and lovely meditations on the places in which we lead – or ought to lead – our lives. And the physical spaces of which Alexander writes – rooms, houses, halls, arcades – become in Finkelstein’s hands a series of metaphorical spaces: the space of consciousness, the interpersonal space of a marriage, the shifting and interlocking spaces of the poems themselves, in their sequence. “An Awakening” is a mysterious but deeply good-natured work, and – like so much of Finkelstein’s poetry, which has never surrendered the Romantic vision of poetry as ultimately redemptive – a deeply utopian one.

[85/100]

Mutschlecner: Sign; Bergvall: Goan Atom

Sign, David Mutschlecner (Ahsahta, 2007)

I’ve never been inclined one way or another in regards to “religious” or spiritual poetry, tho I’ve read my share of Herbert, Donne, & Milton, grappled with Hopkins & David Jones, & more recently enjoyed the work of Donald Revell & Peter O’Leary. It seems somehow appropriate that I paused at the midpoint of Dante’s Paradiso to read David Mutchlecner’s Sign. I must confess – the ceremonies & theology of Roman Catholicism are an alien country to me, brought up as I was in an icon-smashing, bare-pewed Protestantism. But I’m much moved by Sign, by Mutschlecner’s quiet, spare, syntactically straightforward poems of spiritual experience. These are the poems that an ascetic desert Father might write, if he came in the aesthetic mode of Robert Creeley, Theodore Enslin, & Ronald Johnson. The final long sequence, “Poems for the Feast of Corpus Christi,” makes the mass come alive for me more vividly than anyone except Jones himself.

[83/100]
***
Goan Atom, Caroline Bergvall (Krupskaya, 2001)

Zowie! A more rambunctious, high-spirited, madly inventive book hasn’t come my way in ages. The Brits, I’ve gathered, are rightly suspicious of that squishy term the “postmodern,” & those among their interesting writers who take the trouble to label what they’re up to tend rather towards the label “late modernist.” If Bergvall – a British/Norwegian/French poet based in the UK – ’s treading a modernist path, late or otherwise, however, it’s by no means the familiar Pound-Williams-Olson idiom of much of the New American Poetry, but rather some unholy, crystal meth-fueled mixture of Stein, Jarry, Duchamp, Dada, & Russian Futurist Zaum. Voices drop in & out of dialect, letters spill over the page, words break up & reform before one’s eyes. It’s all about sex & puppets, I think, but I’m far from sure, & don’t really care: it makes a lovely, exhilarating noise. Is Bergvall the Derek Bailey of poetry?

[84/100]

Janet Holmes: The Ms of My Kin

The Ms of My Kin, Janet Holmes (Shearsman, 2009)

I’d begun to get intimations that Ronald Johnson’s technique in erasing swatches of Paradise Lost to make his own Radi Os was, 30 years on, beginning to get picked up as a viable, repeatable compositional technique, rather than a one-off tour de force. But Holmes’s Ms of My Kin, an “erasure” of 2 years’-worth of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, is the 1st full-length volume of such work, post-Johnson, I’ve encountered.

Holmes gives the technique a twist: where Johnson’s erasure of Milton, much like Zukofsky’s earlier slice-up in “A”-14, ends up producing a series of highly disjunctive, vividly fragmentary poems that fit snugly within Johnson’s already established obsessions with light, the eye, natural processes, etc., Holme’s provides a final note linking her own Dickinson excavations (pointedly, from poems composed over the first two years of the Civil War) with the World Trade Center attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, & the debacle in Iraq – IEDs, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, the whole blood-boltered business.

The project, then, becomes a series of dramatic monologues spoken by various figures of the last 8 years, from Al Qaeda terrorists to American torturers to Bush himself, & by a voice one might identify with the poet herself – alternatively angry, bewildered, & despairing at the Republic’s mad wrong turnings. There’s a tension here that sits uneasily with me: where Radi Os was composed (like Blake’s illuminated books or Tom Phillips’s Humument) on the level of the page, the page as icon, as it were, Holmes tends to run her discourse from page to page, at the same time preserving the line positions of the often solitary remaining words. It feels, at times, as though Dickinson has become a resource within which the words for preëxisting statements have been found, rather than a text within which new & unexpected poems have been discovered.

Perhaps that’s just a function of my saturation in Johnson; probably, I need to live with Holmes's book a bit longer to get used to her particular take on the poetics of erasure. But at any rate, I can say right now that the poems of The Ms of My Kin are powerful, sometimes funny, & often very moving.

[82/100]

Szymaszek: Emptied of All Ships; Gander: The Blue Rock Collection

Emptied of All Ships, Stacy Szymaszek (Litmus Press, 2008)

One’s 1st unavoidable thought – given the marine imagery, the occasional typographical flourishes – is of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, extended over 70-odd pages. But Mallarmé’s is an immediate, one-time-only shipwreck, a single long statement or canvas (a Turner?), while Szymaszek’s is a whole voyage, a circumnavigation, a Hakluyt of sailings-forth – touching islands, sea battles, reading French novels in the cabin, tattooing one’s hand with a bartered needle, the implacable boredom of shipboard. I’ve never been on a voyage longer than the Scotland-to-Belfast ferry (well, I once crossed the Atlantic, but I was only 3 at the time & don’t remember, tho my parents tell me I was blessedly immune to seasickness) but I’ve read Melville & Dana. Szymaszek, in a radically different idiom – short-lined, spare, rich in allusion – has written a voyage as redolant of the ocean as White-Jacket or Two Years Before the Mast.

[80/100]
***
The Blue Rock Collection, Forrest Gander (Salt, 2004)

I was unaware that Forrest Gander had a degree in geology, but it makes perfect sense, given his sharp eye for minerals. The Blue Rock Collection is a something of a mineralogically-slanted “greatest hits” from Gander’s previously published books, poems complemented by Rikki Ducornet’s drawings of rocks, twigs, birds’ skulls. “A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination” is a fine, plainspoken laying-out of Gander’s poetics & the ethos behind Lost Roads Books, the excellent small press he & CD Wright edit.

[81/100]

leavetaking: Godfrey, Grossman

Off at the crack of dawn for Tennessee, for six days. Probably no blogging.

***

The big Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, which I’d postponed going to for weeks & weeks, was overwhelming, as I feared it might be. I think what I came out of it with was two things: 1) a sense of how carefully worked Bacon’s canvases are; no matter what bits of aleatory or gestures towards abstract expressionism he might incorporate, they’re really very comprehensively planned & carefully executed; 2) a sense of Bacon’s incredible anatomical mastery, which seems to rival that of Michelangelo.

Looking at the large-than-life backdrop of Bacon’s infernal pigsty of a studio, along with his incredibly messy notebooks & reference photos, makes me feel somewhat better about the state of my own study.
***
City of Corners, John Godfrey (Wave Books, 2008)

I need to read more of Godfrey, I think. This collection & Midnight on Your Left, from 2 decades ago, are all I know of his work, but I like both of them very much. Very much – overwhelmingly – an urban poet, a poet of the subway & the city streets & the city nightclubs. An alert, almost aching sensuality, scented with taxi & bus exhaust & the New York summer perfume of rotting garbage – which doesn’t one bit subtract from the poems’ fundamental sexiness, or disguise the thread of longing & affection that runs thruout the volume.

[78/100]
***
Descartes’ Loneliness, Allen Grossman (New Directions, 2007)

As befitting the title, a book of meditative poems, on first things & (often) last things, death conclusion. Scenes of instruction (“the long schoolroom” AG’s figure for the poet’s vocation), not untouched by the erotics of learning on which Anne Carson & Guy Davenport have written so eloquently. One is reminded of the late Yeats, & occasionally of William Bronk, tho Grossman, for me at least, is a far more genial poet than Bronk. Bronk stares unblinkingly into the abyss & issues dour reports; Grossman dances on the edge, aware of his solitude but continually reaching out & blowing kisses to his companions.

[79/100]

various; Susan Stewart: Red Rover

We leave Sunday for several days in God’s Country – Tennessee, my home state – & when we get back we’ll be spending most of the last week of the “vacation” on Fire Island. I hope that there I’ll be able to get some actual writing done. Heaven knows I’ve read enough over the last month, but I’ve made little headway at the various projects that have been piling up on my desktop. So maybe I’ll get at least one of them behind me before classes begin again.
***
Been re-reading Dante, this time in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, which seems sturdy & idiomatic enough. (Alas, the Everyman single-volume Comedy I just bought has no Italian text, but who can afford those Bollingen volumes, anyway?) I don’t know Dante anywhere near as well as I know Milton & Homer (not even to speak of Pound & Zukofsky), but I’m always surprised by how familiar the famous lines & set pieces of the Inferno are. An astonishingly good essay by William Arrowsmith, “Ruskin’s Fireflies” (in the John Dixon Hunt/Faith Holland collection, The Ruskin Polygon) reminds me of how absolutely saturated Ruskin was in Dante – probably as saturated as any major English-language writer except Eliot.
***
Why, alas, did I waste an hour of my life reading Philip Roth’s The Breast? What a nasty, shallow, prurient little book. The difference between Joyce & Roth: Joyce would have imagined the situation of The Breast, bunged it into a hilariously funny page-&-a-half of the “Circe” chapter, & then moved on; Roth wrote a novella (& then 2 prequels). Is P. Roth any relation to Samuel R., the man who first pirated Ulysses in the US (& who ran an English for Immigrants outfit that employed LZ for a while)?
***
Red Rover, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2008)

More spare than the poems of Columbarium and The Forest, less of the lush lyricism of those volumes. The contemporary seems to nag the poet, a humming distraction or a moral quandary continually pulling her away from a contemplation of first things – either the immediate data of the natural world, or the spiritual, martial, & erotic matter of the middle ages & classical antiquity.

[77/100]

place-filling book grouse

Not much news here; backlog of poem-books to note, some CDs purchased the other day.

But here's a grouse: I've noted, over the past few years, that when I buy a hardcover book, its spine is at a nice right angle to its front & back covers (like this: |_. By the time I finish reading thru it – or even by the time I'm halfway thru – the spine is at a slant: ie, \_, with the back corner a trifle further out than the front. Am I somehow mishandling my books? I phoned a rare book dealer friend with this complaint (somehow remembering I'd once upon a time heard a set of instructions for "properly" reading a book). His response: cheap bindings; nothing to be done. Sigh.

I personally don't really give a fast flyer about acid-free superpermanent paper; if my books turn to dust 50 year hence, I probably won't be around to lament them. What I'd like is for them to look half-decent on the shelves right now.

Pound in the marketplace; Susan Stewart: Columbarium

When we first got into the city, I headed down to Union Square & the Strand to pick up a stack of Ruskin books I’d bought online. I didn’t really spend a lot of time there that evening; there were a lot of things I wanted to read thru on hand already, & I didn’t want to disperse my always tenuous attention. Anyway, t'other night I finally made the big pilgrimage & did some serious shopping, filling a bag (mostly) with slim volumes of contemporary poetry.

Do I need to say that decent poetry bookshops in South Florida are pretty much nonexistent? Well, there aren’t many anywhere, for that matter. I don’t know the midwest or the west coast, but on the east coast & south the only good new poetry bookshops I know are Bridge Street in DC, Talking Leaves in Buffalo, & St. Mark’s in NYC. And places that have consistently interesting used stock are even rarer – Rust Belt in Buffalo is the only one that springs to mind. But the Strand’s poetry section is so damned large, & I get up here so rarely, that there’re always at least a dozen things I end up buying. Indeed, semiannual trips to the city & the Strand seem to be the primary way recent works of poetry enter the house anymore. (But yes, I bought your book new, straight from the publisher.)

One of the few non-poetry books I picked up, however, was Gregory Barnhisel’s James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (U Massachusetts P, 2005). A very solid piece of scholarship. It’s weird to think of our distance from the modernists, which these days is approximately that of the modernists themselves from the late romantics. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to get histories of modernist writing that aren’t in the “heroic” mode of Hugh Kenner et al. What they called the “new historicism” in early modern studies when it hit modernism became the “new modernist studies,” & it’s not so much a “new” historicism as the first round of a real live critical history-writing.

At any rate, Barnhisel’s is one of those books whose thesis is so simple & unified & compelling that you wonder why the hell this book wasn’t written decades ago. After a very interesting examination of Pound’s publication history thru the 1930s, veering between trade publishers & small press coterie editions, Barnhisel traces how James Laughlin & ND published & promoted him in the postwar years – when Pound was a political pariah; Pound wanted to be Ruskin, the commentator on culture & society: ND promoted him as Pater, a mostly apolitical aesthete. Or rather, they promoted his poetry & his literary essays & downplayed precisely the public persona he most valued, that of political & economic gadfly.

In the process they implicitly supported & underwrote New Critical apoliticism, & a notion of aesthetic autonomy that went far beyond Pound’s own; for Pound, the poet was both the technician of a purified language and the prophet of corrected social structure: that latter role disappears in his public face, as presented in ND books, between 1946 & 1973 (the year of the Cookson-edited Selected Prose, which finally made many of his economic writings available).

I wish Barnhisel’s prose were a trifle more elegant, & I’d like to see a bit more Bourdieu brought to bear on these issues, but on the whole this is a very useful book indeed. (Not least, he confirms that at least one other reader has conceived the 1930s American publishing scene in much the same way I did in Poem of a Life.)
***
Columbarium, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2003)

A book of “first things” – between the bookends of four longish poems on the 4 Empedoclean elements – air, fire, water, earth – a series of shorter poems on various themes, arranged from A to Z. The elements of which we are made & among which we live, & the 26 glyphs by which we comprehend & express them. A curious blending of the pre-Sokratic & the high classical (Virgil’s Georgics one touchstone). As always in Stewart’s work, an almost obsessive, loving regard for the evidence of the senses. An impressive range of forms in the alphabetic section, most of them ad hoc & gracefully realized.

[76/100]

Donald Revell: Thief of Strings

Thief of Strings, Donald Revell (Alice James, 2007)

I read Revell in a kind of enraptured haze, I’m so taken with the odd combination of his poetry: a lovely, consistent lyricism, a mild, very American surrealism, an entraced eye for the unfolding details of the (especially natural) world, closely tied in with a genial piety. If Geoffrey Hill is a High Church Anglican Prophetic poet, & Susan Howe an Antinomian Calvinist poet, then Revell is a Franciscan poet. And that’s a compliment.

[75/100]

Susan Stewart: The Forest

I didn’t think I’d buy it when I saw it in Book Culture (used to be Labyrinth), but ultimately I couldn’t resist Robert Hewison’s John Ruskin, in the Oxford UP series “Very Interesting People.” The series itself seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “Very Short Introductions” series – 120 or so page lives of British worthies, small paperbacks in large type with ample margins & generous spacing.

A glance inside shows that what they’re doing essentially is marketing single lives from the big 2000 relaunch of the Dictionary of National Biography. I suppose with 55,000 entries to that monstrosity, along with the rumors I’d heard of less than stellar sales, OUP is trying to recoup some of what must have been an enormous investment. But Hewison is one of the biggest names in Ruskin studies, author of several important books, & the damn thing was only $3.98 – how could I lose? At any rate, it turns out to be a very nice compact biography indeed, managing to do justice to almost every aspect of JR’s life & career. A definite recommendation for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the man without investing in a full-length life.
***
The Forest, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 1995)

A kind of effortless mastery to much of this book, & a deep interest in interesting things quite apart from the poet’s own sensibility, which I appreciate – the embryology of “The Desert 1990-1993,” the Biblical rewriting of “Lamentations.” “Medusa Anthology,” which revolves around Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa, is the great set-piece, but for my tastes it ends on afar too lyrical, conclusive note – as do too many of the poems. I think I like the more ambiguous, fragmentary works of Part I, “Phantom,” better than the more accomplished longer pieces of “Cinder,” the 2nd part. But there’s much to admire thruout the book, even if Stewart in her more traditionally formalist moments isn’t my cuppa.

[74/100]

back on the air

The city has been considerably less muggy & unbearable than last summer – less, that is, like Florida. That hasn’t kept me from being in a state of almost savage torpor, sitting in the sun & reading book after book. I have now joined the 200 or so members of the Have Read All the Way Thru Fors Clavigera Club. The last half-volume or so rather sombre stuff; Ruskin returns from his penultimate bout of lunacy annoucing that from now on Fors will renounce its rage and contumely, that he’s going to clean up his act & stop digressing all over the planet, & that he’s generally going to be nice. Of course, he can’t keep any of those resolutions, but he tries to hold to them staunchly enough to quell much of the flame of the book. His mind is elsewhere, on the genial autobiography Praeterita which he’s already writing.

Far more fun are the 10 or 12 volumes of Guy Davenport’s I’ve brought along with me. He’s always a pleasure to revisit, if only on the basis of style (heaven knows he can be enormously off base when it comes to the fiddly business of facts). Even Objects on a Table, the book on still life, has paid off more this time around than the first time I read it.

Little Women, which I was reading (ashes of shame upon my head) for the first time, ended satisfactorily. If Alcott felt compelled to bow to readerly pressure & marry off Jo, rather than preserving her as an independent writing woman, then I approve of marrying her to a portly, bearded professor-type. Mark well: only portly, bearded professor-types can truly satisfy a thinking woman!
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And the occasional bouts of “culture.” I went to see Godot on Broadway, in a production with brilliant Bill Irwin as Didi, Nathan Lane hamming it up as Gogo (one wonders what he’ll do when there aren’t any more Zero Mostel parts to reprise – if he doesn’t go on the South Florida borscht belt circuit with Fiddler on the Roof), & the hulking John Goodman as Pozzo. Surprisingly good, actually, tho I kept feeling like I was attending Old Home Day of my kids’ favorite actors (Irwin in “Mr. Noodle” on Elmo’s World, Goodman Sully in Monsters Inc., Lane the warthog in Lion King): audience members without small children no doubt had entirely different associations for each of those worthies.

The real prize was Krystian Lupa and the Narodowy Stary Teatr’s hour stage adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works, under its German title Kalkwerk & performed in Polish. Devastating. As I described it to J, it was a cross between Wozzeck and Endgame, only spread out over three & a half hours, and punctuated with ear-splitting dissonant music. Certainly a limit-text for traditional theater.

Oh yes, and Janet McTeer in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, a full-blown Romantic reinterpretation of the all the old Shakespearean dramatic moves – but nonetheless quite compelling.
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Weeekends have been spent on Fire Island, where one kills mosquitoes at night and horseflies during the day (sorry, Buddhists), and the worst traffic noise comes from bicycle bells.

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100 poem-books shortly (I hope) to recommence.

ad interim

Hi folks – he said shamefacedly. Well, I was pretty sanguine about keeping the blog updated over the summer this year, but obviously that hasn't happened. And I don't think this note is going to add up to anything more than a placeholder either. But we're still here in New York: we've been to scads of culture: Godot, Mary Stuart, Alan Ayckbourn on Broadway; the fantastic Polish adaptation on Thomas Bernhard's Lime Works at Lincoln Center. Seen some people, read some – well, read a lot of – books. I'm considering a resolution to restart regular blogging next week – when we get back from Fire Island, that is. Till then ––

interim

Here on the upper West Side; the weather is holding beautifully – little rain, low humidity, a veritable paradise after Florida. Alas, I packed precisely two books for the trip (still awaiting the various cartons we shipped) – Guy Davenport's Tatlin! and the last 2 vols of Fors Clavigera. And now I've finished Tatlin!, & fear that Fors will last until the rest of the books arrive. Or I may have to go out & buy more.... (Always a distinct possibility in NY)

(And yes, despite myself, I'm blogging from Starbucks – which beats blogging from my phone...)

lights out, for a bit

We're leaving this afternoon to spend much of the rest of the summer in New York; dunno how much sustained internet access I'll have, & don't fancy blogging from Starbucks. So the updates here will probably be even sparer than they've been lately. But for those who're interested, I'll no doubt be twittering, & I'll certainly be posting occasional Facebook updates.

Time to read some books, I guess, & get some actual writing done.

Would be nice to hook up with anyone who wants in the city; drop me a line.