Hurrah for Euphony!

Among the busyness of getting ready to leave, & the inevitable quandariness of deciding what books to carry & which to leave, a lovely package comes thru the transom: The big-ass collection Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, edited by Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger and published by the Orono-conference-sponsoring National Poetry Foundation.

This is it, all you Johnsonians out there: almost 700 pages of tasty criticism, memoir (Peter O'Leary recalls his "apprenticeship" to RJ), interviews, and bibliography (at long last, a full primary & secondary bibliography of Johnson's works). The list of contributors is almost a who's-who of coolness: Patrick Pritchett, Norman Finkelstein, Ed Foster, Donald Revell, Barbara Cole, Susan M. Schultz, Mike Basinski, Marjorie Perloff, jena Osman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jonathan Skinner, Gregg Biglieri, Graham Foust, Paul Naylor, & a bunch of others just as hip & intelligent.

And need I mention that there are two articles by your humble blogger?: "Notes and Numbers (Johnson, Ives, Zukofsky)" and "The Book of the Green Man: Ronald Johnson's American England." You can order the whole thing here.

(I'm posting in part because I imagine my old chum Eric S. is out of internet range, since he's spending several weeks strumming his mandolin & getting drunk on fine Irish whiskey in Killarney. Alas – some people have it hard.)

Parnassus; August Kleinzahler: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep

It's been a bleary last few days. J's been out of town at the Shakespeare Association conference in Dallas, so I've been flying mostly solo with the girls, running thru the usual hit & miss of menu choices (palak paneer: Daphne yes, Pippa no; gumbo: D. no, P. yes; mac & cheese: both yes), trying to get to bed a trifle earlier than usual to anticipate the 7 AM wake-up visits, & in general struggling to keep the whole complex machinery of the household from falling apart. But now we're once more a foursome, & J & I can play divide & conquer when things get touchy.
***
My old friend Eric – ¡Hola, viejo! – reminds me that I ought to draw attention to the just-released 30th anniversary issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Check out their website for a list of some of the goodies in this almost 700-page behemoth, including "Marrow-Bones and Turkish Delight," my own biggish career overview of Ronald Johnson's work – an essay I've been imagining my way thru for a decade or so now. Not that it turned out nearly as good as I'd like, but the beginning's pretty snappy:

While my own native greens-and-ham-hock southern cuisine is a hard sell to my friends with more sophisticated palates, my mother’s pecan pie recipe has always been well received. A simple concoction: in a single bottom piecrust (home-made or store-bought) you set out a layer of halved pecans, then pour over them an inch or so of beaten eggs and heavy corn syrup. In the oven, the pecans rise to the top to be crisped in the heat, while the syrup-egg mixture congeals into a hard gel. Crunchy pecans, flaky crust, and a center of unadulterated, primordial sugar: what’s not to love (if you aren’t a diabetic, that is)?

The poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who worked as a chef and caterer and who made most of what little money writing brought him from his excellent cookbooks, offers a variation of the traditional southern pecan pie in The American Table (1984). (My own copy has reached the stage of broken-spined, gravy-spattered dilapidation that marks a personal classic in the genre.) Instead of “the usual bottled dark ‘Karo,’” Johnson’s pie is based on a syrup made of sugar, orange juice, and the thinly sliced peels of two oranges. It’s still a pecan pie, the saccharine nemesis of dieters everywhere, but a pecan pie with a sophisticated twist, the orange peel adding a sour, slightly bitter zest like the tang of remorse.

I go on to talk about poetry, by the way, not just cooking.
***
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)

[9/100]

This one won the 2004 Griffin Prize, the big Canadian jackpot. And good for August K., I say. I've been reading him – never religiously, always with pleasure – for over 20 years now, since Guy Davenport told me (on a blurb to Storm Over Hackensack) that his poems were "structures as cunningly built as kites and canoes." I suppose some of my friends would toss Kleinzahler into whatever oubliette of their imagination corresponds to Ron Silliman's "school of quietude" – & it's true that K's working in a sturdy, straightforward idiom that's essentially similar to what WC Williams forged 85 years ago. But his ear for music is so strong, his diction is so aggressively varied, & he never lingers too much on himself: the world outside – its sights, noises, smells, songs, minute particulars – is so interesting that the last thing Kleinzahler wants to do is lamnet his own fuckups or celebrate his own sensitivity. A lot of travel poems here, & some of them it's true come perilously close to the "I'm lonely on a reading tour" subgenre. But Kleinzahler's scorn for the prima donna aesthete stance is so acidly evident that even a poem about the yearly shutting-down of an artists' colony – "The Art Farm" – reads like a savage indictment, without a single explicit word. A nature poet, but his nature's urban.

Prynne & pleasure; incoming

What with J. away in Phoenix for a drama conference, I'm one day into a four-day stint of single parenting, & am thus far just plain exhausted. Not necessarily in a bad way – some of the day's events have been very pleasant indeed, & the weather at least is cooperating by not being godawfully hot (which in South Florida is still more than possible in mid-November).
***
Among the great stacks of unsifted mail I find the latest Chicago Review (53:2/3), which I'd opened and briefly glanced at. Too briefly, it turns out, for I find to my delight that this issue publishes the hitherto unpublished Book V of Ronald Johnson's Radi os, as edited by Johnson's executor the estimable Peter O'Leary. I can't wait to read it – but it'll have to wait till tomorrow, when I'm a bit less bleary.
***
Tonight in the graduate poetry workshop I pretend to lead (moderate? ride herd on?) a student did a stunning presentation on JH Prynne's Furtherance, turning up all sorts of riches that I hadn't yet uncovered in my own readings of the book. That in itself was delightful, especially in contrast to what I'd been reading lately myself (in addition to the big Bloodaxe Prynne Poems), NH Reeve & Richard Kerridge's Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of JH Prynne (Liverpool UP, 1995).

This, I will admit, is my 3rd assault on the book – the 3rd time I've started to read it; the previous two attempts have petered out somewhere in the second chapter. It's by no means a stupid book – quite the contrary – nor is it poorly written: indeed, it's marked by a refreshing lucidity. But once again I'm reminded of why I've started and abandoned the book twice now, & am unsure whether I'll get thru it this time. R&K, that is, pay far too little attention to the phenomenology of reading Prynne; while they give an obligatory nod to the notion that JHP is notoriously "difficult," they entirely ignore the reaction that the average reader – & even the average reader of modernist & late modernist poetry – has to work of such obduracy: a reaction, that is, of boredom, of resentment, of grudging labor, ultimately perhaps of abandonment. In short, they spend precisely no time exploring or discussing what sorts of pleasure Prynne's poetry might offer.

I for one value Prynne's work very highly indeed. While I came to it relatively late – I think I bought my first Prynne book, a little second-hand copy of High Pink on Chrome, around 1992 or so – I've always taken a particular pleasure (perhaps in part masochistic) in the dense & shifting textures of his poetry. And I know a lot of people who do likewise.

But Reeve & Kerridge, in their intelligent but profoundly dispassionate analysis of Prynne, fail utterly to present any reasons, apart from the intellectual unpacking of the verse*, why anyone who isn't already committed to the poet would want to read JHP's work. It's true, one doesn't have to make such an argument for Pound, or Joyce, or perhaps even Zukofsky – at least not now – but in the first book devoted to a "notoriously difficult" writer, the failure to make any sort of partisan appeal to pleasure strikes me as a significant misstep. Maybe that appeal's just yet to come, somewhere in chapter 3 or 4. But that'll be too late for non-Prynnites, I'm afraid.

*R & K's actual readings of Prynne's poems, so far as I've read, too rarely go beyond the "let's see what kind of sense can be made of these lines" move – ie, let's see how we can try to translate them into something resembling a coherent line of discourse. Sorry, gentlemen, but I can do that sort of work on my own – & end up liking my naturalizations better than yours.