Boston and "The Fading Smile"

BACK in the '90s, when I was at my most ravenous about learning about poetry, I read a number of very fine memoirs about poets. Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth (with its unforgettable portrait of Delmore Schwartz) was one, Donald Hall's Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (Dylan Thomas!) is another. Both are classics, but my favorite may be Peter Davison's The Fading Smile, set in Boston/Cambridge in the late '50s as American poetry was going through an important transformation.

Only a few hours remain in National Poetry Month, but I'll put aside my instinct to mock these official cultural holidays and discuss Davison's wonderfully distilled memoir-of-sorts for a moment.

The Fading Smile's subtitle is "Poets in Boston, 1955-1960, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath," and it's largely a series of profiles of the poets who flourished, competed and quarreled at a time when Frost was fading from the scene but holding forth on the outskirts of Harvard. Besides the poets above, it looks at Richard Wilbur (the most Apollonian of the bunch), the minister's son W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton (!!), Plath (who Davison, a poet and important poetry editor, briefly dated before she fell into the burly arms of Ted Hughes), feminist "daughter-in-law" Adrienne Rich, the overlooked ad-man poet L.E. Sissman, and Stanley Kunitz (a generation older than the rest but just as tormented.)

Lowell of course acts as a cross between a maven who brings everyone together and a sort of Mad Hatter. Like many of the poets here, he went through a metamorphosis during this period, and his late-'50s work helps inaugurate a wilder, more visceral, less European, less New Critic-driven poetry that came to be called Confessional.

Of course, each figure had his or her own trajectory, as Davison's portraits make clear. He mostly stays out of the way of the action, except when his appearances are useful, resisting the urge to settle scores of make himself into the book's hero.

Part of what I like, too, are the well-chosen selections from each poet's work, and the sense of literary context that it all adds up to. That is, there was a back-and-forth between this scene with developments in the UK -- several of them put in brief stints in England -- as well as the Beat action in San Francisco.

I'll just close by recommending this book -- so soon after the tragedy of the Boston Marathon -- to anyone who cares about American literature. And now, go read some poetry.

Los Angeles Gets a Poet Laureate

WELL, folks, the mayor has appointed Eloise Klein Healy the city's first poet laureate. Here's the LA Times story.

Healy and I have a second-hand connection since we've both published on Red Hen Press, so I will not evaluate her work except to say I'm pleased with her appointnent. Here's poet Dana Gioia, who was part of the selection committee, on her commitment to the city:

Healy has devoted her time and energy to building the L.A. literary community. For years she has exhibited the passion and commitment for public service that we looked for in a poet laureate. When she applied for the position, she also wrote a detailed vision of what she hoped to accomplish if she was awarded the position. It was clear from this statement that she not only had a vision of her laureateship but that it was also based in a deep understanding of L.A.'s literary and educational landscape.

A hearty congratulations to Eloise Klein Healy from The Misread City!

Robinson Jeffers at USC

READERS of this blog know that we've got a special place in our collective hearts for Robinson Jeffers, the great California poet of the '30s and '40s who settles in the rugged, unpopulated coastline north of Big Sur. (He was voted Best California Poet right here on The Misread City.)

On Thursday, a festival devoted to Jeffers' life and work will take place at USC, one of his two alma maters (he shares Occidental College with our president, Ben Affleck and my wife.) As the university's release has it: "The panels and exhibition will explore Jeffers’ relationship to the natural world, Jeffers and the art of the book, and his story as a young poet in early 20th-century Los Angeles. Jeffers manuscripts and photographs, many of which are rarely seen by the public, will be on view."

One of very few people I know whose ardor for Jeffers outstrips mine is my old friend Dana Gioia, whose essay on the poet in Can Poetry Matter? made me think about Jeffers in a new way.

Dana and I discussed the poet and his legacy here.

Robinson Jeffers seems like the most distinctly California poet conceivable. It's really hard to imagine him coming from anywhere else, isn't it?

Jeffers was a poet who could only have developed as he did in California and probably only in the Modernist era.

His search for a distinctly modern voice took an entirely different course than any of his Eastern contemporaries. The still pristine landscape of California gave him a direct relationship with nature (and a skepticism about human civilization) that would not have been possible in New York or London.

What's the purpose of the Jeffers Festival at USC? What will it be like?

My aim is to bring Jeffers back to his alma mater. He is the most considerable writer ever to have attended USC, and the university has mostly forgotten him. I want to reclaim his legacy. I am pleased to report that everyone I have approached here has been eager to help. We have deliberated put together a conference that is not just literary chatter. Our speakers -- a great historian, a major sci-fi novelists/naturalist, a fine press printer, and a biographer -- will celebrate aspects of Jeffers' work not likely to be discussed in an English department.

What is your relationship to his work?

Jeffers has had an impact on my imagination. He showed how powerful and original poetry could be written out of my native landscape. His work also showed that a great Modernist could write in ways that were both innovative and accessible.  

Can you mention a poem, or a line, by Jeffers and tell us why it

resonates with you?

I love so much of Jeffers' poetry that it is hard to pick a single poem or single line. "To the Stone-Cutters" is only ten lines long, but it has a 

huge resonance.  It begins:

    

   Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated 

   Challengers of oblivion

   Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,

   The square-limbed Roman letters

   Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.  The poets as well

   Builds his monument mockingly....

That seems to be true of time, life, and poetry. I love the way the free verse lines alternate long and short and quietly echo the long lines of Latin and Greek poetry without ever making an issue of their lineage. It's learned but light, clear but incisive.

Can 21st Century Poetry Matter?

OKAY, okay, I'll admit it's a bit corny to post on verse during National Poetry Month, but I couldn't resist. I turned to some distinguished friends of The Misread City, from different walks of life, to tell my readers which recent books they're excited about. (I'm eager, too, to have some new titles to augment my on-again, off-again collection of Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, James Fenton, Philip Larkin and Rilke.)

Let’s start with the fact that most educated people – including many literary people – read little or no poetry, especially recent poetry. It’s an issue that two members of my kitchen cabinet, poet/critic Dana Gioia and poet/ book publicist Kim Dower, have very different takes on.

"When people tell me -- and this is what they always tell me -- that they don't like most new poetry, I agree,” Dana says. “Most new poetry isn't very good. Poetry is one of those odd arts in which the work either has to be wonderful or it isn't worthwhile.  A mediocre movie might be watchable, but no one wants to spend two hours with a mediocre book of poems. It's like striking a book of soggy matches. None of them ignite.”

Kim, whose first poetry collection, Air Kissing on Mars, comes out in October on Red Hen, says this: “The state of poetry is so alive it's hyperventilating,” thanks to  an “abundance and variety of voices, styles, ways of seeing the world. Poetry is indeed the highest art and needn't be difficult or esoteric. Poetry should be enjoyed, read aloud, felt, inhaled.”

My third enthusiast has inhaled a lot -- maybe too much. “See, I can’t seem to stop myself,” Jeff Gordinier, a jet-setting Details writer and author of the Gen-X manifesto X Saves the World, wrote on this piece for the Poetry Foundation. “A compulsion to feed my poetry fix as soon as I hit town — any town, every town — seems, at least on the surface, like a safe indulgence.” But is it? (Read Jeff’s piece to find out.)

     Here are a few recommendation from Dana Gioia:

Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).  Kay Ryan is funny, weird, and wise.  Her poems are very short, intricately written, and interwoven  with hidden rhymes.  This is not just one of the best books of poems this year. It will be one of the best books of the decade and beyond.  Ryan is the brilliant outsider looking at life from the odd and revealing angle. 

Katha Pollitt, The Mind-Body Problem (2009).  This is Pollitt's second collection of poems. Her first appeared 27 years ago.  This book is smart, witty, and consumately urbane -- depicting the highs and lows of the smart middle-class in middle age.  It is one of the few recent books that I have read cover to cover.  And then I read it again. Maybe more poets should wait 27 years between volumes.

A. E. Stallings Hapax (2006). Stallings is a Southern gal living in Greece, and she has a classical turn to her imagination.  Over the past ten years she has published so many ingenious and memorable poems--from the comic to heartbreaking--that she has become one of my favorite poets now writing.  If you doubt me, read her "First Love: A Quiz," a multiple choice poem that simultaneously tells the story of Persephone and a potentially murderous white-trash date in rhymed free verse.

David Mason, Ludlow: A Verse Novel (2007).  There are very few good book-length contemporary poems.  If the story is good, the poetry is usually missing.  If the language is strong, there is often very little happening.  Mason is a compelling storyteller who recreates the the violent Ludlow Massacre of 1914 when hired guns attacked striking Colorado miners and their families. This book reads better than most novels but adds the particular power of poetry to hit our emotions and imagination.  I was delighted to see the book belatedly featured a few weeks ago on the Lehrer News Hour--proving that poetry really is news that stays news.

    Here are Kim Dower’s recs:

Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems, A New Selection Edited by Mark Ford, published by Knopf (2008) - no one beats O'Hara when it comes to a fresh and original voice, New York school, the one poet who inspired and influenced so many. Everyday stories that linger for life.  Every word and beat is an exciting experience to cherish!  

Move right into Billy Collins who takes an ordinary experience and stretches it into a whole other way of seeing life. Any one of his books will toss readers into the appealing and unprecedented joys of poetry, and his latest, The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems is as accessible as the others, with poems that show us ordinary moments as ways to explore ourselves and the world around us: lying in bed, eating a ham sandwich, the heads  of roses beginning to droop . . .  

Denise Duhamel is an exciting and vibrant poet and KA-CHING published last year by the University of Pittsburgh Press is an invigorating and smashingly original book about luck. Funny and twisted, one of Denise's poems is also in a great new anthology that all poetry lovers -- old and new -- should have at their bedside: The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner, published by Scribner.  Her poem, "How It Will End," is a provocative and humorous look at relationships and takes the "he said, she said" theme into a divine dimension.  

Thomas Lux's newest book, GOD PARTICLES, published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin is gorgeous, dark heartbreaking and funny.  

Zen monk Seido Ray Ronci, winner of this year's PEN Award for his marvelous book, THE SKELETON OF THE CROW, Ausable Press, 2008, offers readers his life's work, a book rich and simple, beautiful and intimate.  


And Kim Addonizio, delights with her newest, LUCIFER AT THE STARLITE, published by Norton - imaginative, luxurious, intimate and kickass. 

    Finally, these are some picks from Jeff Gordinier, who goes book shopping with Keanu Reeves here:

Take It, by Joshua Beckman (Wave Books, 2009) Beckman surveys the fractal dementia of our landscape ("The neighbors were going at it / with gas plungers again" and "Big eaters of America, I join you in your parade") with the eyes of a doomed and displaced Romantic.

Wind in a Box, by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2006) Living, breathing, swiveling, shape-shifting poems about (or not) Michael Jackson, Dr. Seuss, David Bowie, Jorge Luis Borges, Melvin Van Peebles, and picking up a woman in "deep blue denim" at a bus stop.

I Was the Jukebox, by Sandra Beasley (Norton, 2010) The wispy mists of contemporary poetry tend to make you yawn? Beasley is the bracing antidote. Consider the opening lines of her poem "Osiris Speaks": "I left my heart in San Francisco. / I left my viscera in the Netherlands. / I left my liver on the 42 Line, headed / from Farragut Square to the White House."

Rain, by Don Paterson (FSG, 2010) Paterson is a Scotsman who is skilled at writing vibrant, exquisite poems in just about every emotional and intellectual mode: He can be brusque and tender (consider "Why Do You Stay Up So Late?") and scholarly and sexy and hauntingly mystical and uproariously funny, sometimes all at once. His poems are so alive that it can feel as though they might start crawling across the page. 

Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London

California Poetry and Robinson Jeffers

WHEN I put together a blog poll on Best California Poet, I was certain Charles Bukowski was going to barge in, whiskey bottle in hand, and run away with it.

So I’m pleased to report that a far more significant poet ended up winning – and by a landslide. Take a bow, Robinson Jeffers!! He not only presided over the best turned-out vote in the history of The Misread City, he won by nearly as large a margin as Jimi Hendrix did in my Favorite Guitarist poll.

Of course, in most circles, the great poet of Carmel and Big Sur is still largely unknown – as is the runner up, Weldon Kees, who drew nearly double the votes Barfly garnered.

Jeffers – a classically flavored poet of wide-open spaces and the expanses of the Pacific -- and Kees – a jazz-loving hipster who (probably) threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955 – could not be more different. But I’m quite honored to have both of them championed by readers of The Misread City.

“No major poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers,” Dana Gioia wrote in his essay “Strong Counsel,” going on to describe his embrace by environmentalists and general readers and his neglect by literary scholars.

“More than any other American Modernist Jeffers wrote about ideas – not teasing epistemologies, learned allusions, or fictive paradoxes – but big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.”

Dana and I disagree on a number of things, but Jeffers is one place where our tastes come together, and we both love Tor House, the poet’s domicile in Carmel.

U.S. Poet laureate and poetic minimalist Kay Ryan also drew a good number of votes, while Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti did less well.

This poll, like all of them, drew protests for who was not included. As I sometimes say, running a poll with too many choices is like throwing a party in a house with too many rooms – you need some compression so people will come together. Still, I wish I’d put Gary Snyder in here instead of Ferlinghetti – Snyder’s career has continued to evolve and deepen, and he will probably be part of my next literary poll.

As for Buk, I have nothing against the guy, and like some of the work okay. No doubt he would be more fun to hang out with than Jeffers, who was often cranky and very austere in his tastes. But much of the cult of Bukowski, I think, turns on the American romanticism of alcoholism. All of the other poets on the list have earned their reputations from something more substantial. Here's to them.

New Editor at Paris Review

I've been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein -- a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major houses -- for years now. So I wasn't alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.

Stein -- who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press's translations of Bolano's Savage Detectives and 2666, and three of the five National Book Award finalists from 2008 and, more recently, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Elif Batuman's The Possessed -- takes over the job held for decades by George Plimpton and most recently by Philip Gourevitch.

(I recall meeting Plimpton at the LATimes Festival of Books a few years ago -- it was the most starstruck I have ever seen my then-girlfriend/now-wife.)

I've corresponded with Stein a few times and been struck by both his serious commitment to literature -- he is a burning advocate of the twisted poet Frederick Seidel -- and his highly developed Gen X irony. (Will the next Paris Review offer long interviews with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, Lois and poet David Berman? The Misread City would not object.)

I spoke to Stein in '07 for THIS story in response to Granta's '07Best Young Author's issue, which included many foreign born authors. (The piece also includes interviews with then-Granta editor Ian Jack and critic Laura Miller.)

He talked about the days, as recently as the mid-'90s, when a literary review's author list could still enrage people:

"I'm not going to be able to walk into a party, or a bar, and get into that fight now," he said. "Because that discussion is over. The readership has fractured, and reads less, and spends more time e-mailing. And it makes less sense to talk about novelists now -- the really creative writing is being done in other genres" such as the personal essay, reportage and criticism.

"The novel has become like landscape painting," he said. "It's the 'top' genre, but not, in real life, the main one."

Here's looking forward to where Lorin Stein takes the Paris Review.

Robinson Jeffers and Big Sur

"NO major American poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers," poet/critic dana gioia wrote in 1987, lamenting the lack of scholarly attention, an up-to-date selected poems, or a full-dress biography of this california writer who was once read voraciously and still inspires environmentalists.

a few things have changed since then, but the great poet of california's central coast is still widely overlooked. HERE is my humble attempt to try to bring this austere and charismatic man some attention. this is basically a travel piece about big sur and carmel, but with jeffers's life, work and times -- mostly the 1930s -- providing the framework.

so we visited Tor House -- the stone house jeffers had built, and the tower he built, almost single-handedly, for his wife by rolling stones up from the pacific -- the point lobos state park he captured in verse, as well as the henry miller library, dedicated to a writer who knew and admired jeffers.

while watching at the pacific's waves slam into the towering rocks, it was hard not to be struck with jeffers' vision of the california coast as both the geographic end of western culture's grand experiment and a renewing source for it.

Seamus Heaney on Recession and Heroism

MONDAY marked seamus heaney's 70th birthday. i know this blog is in danger of drowning in a sea of green -- between morrissey and john lennon, both of irish descent, oscar wilde's poll position, and st. patrick's day, i am flying the celtic flag high.

but let me discuss the nobel-winning irishman for a second. i am sympathetic to the argument that heaney ceased being a great poet when he became, in the eyes of the world, a charming irish sage... he has done no single book of poems quite as tough as "north" for decades now.

but his translation of "beowulf" was terrific. i had the pleasure of speaking to him a few years back for this slate piece about the anglo-saxon epic, heroism and the sound of poetry in general. in fact, his essay "england of the mind," on the way larkin, hughes and geoffrey hill each use a different version (with respective historical and religious echoes) of english in their work is one of the best things i've ever read on the art.

tim rutten, LAT columnist and irishman himself, offers this fine column on how heaney and his work inform our present slumping moment. in barest form, heaney suggests fortifying one's inner life to survive life's ups and downs -- the latter a subject the irish know well, especially with death of the celtic tiger.   

 

i'll look forward to going back to the man's poetry and essays this week. 

enthusiasts of heaney's work should also know of this very extensive fan site.

anyone have a fave heaney poem with which to toast the man's 70th?

Photo credit: seamusheaney.org