Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...gist-movement/

POETRY NEWS
Newly Translated Letter From Ezra Pound Clarifies Imagist Movement
BY HARRIET STAFF

Jared Spears presents and dissects a heretofore untranslated 1928 letter from Ezra Pound to French scholar and critic René Taupin:
The letter was prompted by Taupin’s analysis of Imagism, the avant-garde movement Pound, an American expatriate, had helped found in London after the dawn of the new century. Taupin, then chairman of romance languages at Hunter College, asserted that Imagism was almost inseparable from earlier French Symbolists (an argument which would culminate in his 1929 book, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry). For Pound, Taupin’s assertions belittled what he believed to be the unique accomplishments of his own literary movement.
More from Jacket2:
Pound’s letter to Taupin serves as his rebuttal. Due to Pound’s scattered, almost stream-of-conscious writing style, passages of the letter are dissected here to better follow his logic, beginning with his opening:
Of course, if you permit an inversion of time, in some Einsteinian relativity, it would seem likely to you that I’d received the idea of the image from the poems of Hilda Doolittle, written after that idea was received. See the dates of the various books.
To lay the base for his argument, Pound painstakingly makes a case for a less direct influence on Imagism from modern French writers, asserting that he and his cohorts arrived at their conclusions more or less independently. He describes trademarks of his own style as “[v]ery severe self-examination  —  and intolerance for all the mistakes and stupidities of French poets.”
Pound goes on to trace the general flow of poetic innovation from French writers of the late nineteenth century through Symons, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. “Certainly progress in the poetic technique,” he admits. But it is from Arthur Rimbaud that Pound traced the origin of modernist writing, a fact in general consensus today.
That which Rimbaud reached by intuition (genius) in some poems, created via (perhaps?) conscious aesthetic  —  I do not want to ascribe him any unjust achievement  —  but for all that I know. I’m doing an aesthetic more or less systematic  —  and could have named certain poems of Rimbaud as example. (Yet also some poems of Catullus.)
And it is certain that apart from some methods of expression  —  Rimbaud and I have but a point of resemblance. But almost all of the experimentation, poetic technique of 1830-up to me  —  was made in France.
Experimentation perhaps, but not progress, continues Pound in signature frankness.
Find the full essay and the letter here. Check out the initial publication, in its original French, in Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941 (New Directions 1971).
Tags: Ezra Pound, Jacket2, Jared Spears, New Directions
Posted in Poetry News on Wednesday, July 1st, 2015 by Harriet Staff

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

["She thinks the monkey's bad luck..."]
BY PHILIP JENKS
I.

She thinks the monkey's bad luck because
of all the Institutions it's seen.
A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie,
with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips
curling out to smile and greet the staff
as I ask for the nth time why no release
or where is Albeheary? By now,
anything may well prove to be true,
which, of course, is insane.

II.

Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it,
When I'm on the outside, the backpack
Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies
Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me.
Who, art? Thinning. More vodka.
This time Lakeshore third floor,
My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black
Trans/guy who did my dialing for me.
Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves.

My roomie he collapsed his lung
Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place.
Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate
Last New Year's as the one before.
The shakes are permanent.
The stain all the more so, like nothing.
Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning.
Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you)
This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in.


III.
At one point, there was something to it.
As when he found a hernia on me in the tub
And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor.
Then hospital at five years old and a Curious
Curious George story. How he went too.
Or windup Campbell's Soup.
Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort.
Night rounds. Book learnt animal instinct.
Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is modern poetry that has a feel, has a meaning. Its very descriptive and shows lots of pain, emotion, thought and imagination.
Vast majority of modern poetry I have no care for but when its good I simply love it..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...aul-batchelor/


FROM POETRY MAGAZINE

Judge How He Fleeceth the Country
BY PAUL BATCHELOR
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
[Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Paul Batchelor’s “The Discoverer’s Man” appears in the July/August 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

There’s something disreputable about dramatic monologues. It’s easy to write a passable one but almost impossible to write a good one. They are never fashionable, but there’s never a shortage of them either. I’m not sure that I would mount a defence of the form even if I could. Instead, I want to talk about some of the models I had in mind when writing ‘The Discoverer’s Man’, a dramatic monologue set in the 1680s and spoken by an old man who in his youth acted as a witch-finder’s assistant.
The exploits of my Discoverer and his Man are based loosely on those of the real-life witch-finders Matthew Hopkins (c.1620-1647) and John Stearne (c.1610-1670). I began the poem after reading Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill, which led me to the accounts provided by Hopkins and Stearne themselves (the phrase ‘Judge how he fleeceth the Country’ is taken from Hopkins’s self-justification, The Discovery of Witches). Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, is the most famous witch-finder, for reasons that are not altogether clear. The speaker of my poem is an assistant to an unnamed Hopkins-like figure, but the real-life Hopkins himself started out as a Man to Stearne. My Elizabeth Bell is based on Elizabeth Clarke, Hopkins’s first victim; and my John Knowles is based on John Lowes, the vicar whose execution represented Hopkins’s most remarkable success. My description of Knowles’s execution draws on various accounts of similar deaths in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a work that Hopkins would have known well. Many of the incidental details of the witch-hunts (e.g., the names of Bell/Clarke’s familiars) were too good to be left out: that a starved and sleep-deprived old woman being tortured by her neighbours would name one of her devilish familiars ‘Newes’ (ie. gossip) is a heartbreaking detail. Similarly, when my Discoverer promises never to accuse anyone, he echoes Hopkins and Stearne, who only ever went where they were invited.
At a certain point, I realised that researching the historical record was inhibiting me. The poem went cold and progress slowed. In the end it took five years to complete, and only when I knew I was nearly finished did I begin a second wave of research, in which I tried to check that the things I’d invented weren’t too far off the mark. In the mean time, what helped me to bring my characters back to life (to me anyway) was thinking of three less obviously relevant figures: Tony Blair, Nick Leeson, and Myra Hindley.
Tony Blair led the Labour party to a landslide win in the 1997 U.K. general election, having stood for vaguely-defined ‘change’, which turned out to mean a continuation of neoliberal economics augmented with higher public spending. Officially, of course, it was the Labour party that won; but really it was Blair and his acolytes. Although what he led was not quite a personality cult, the Labour party has been gripped by an identity crisis ever since he stepped down as Prime Minister. The public euphoria with which his 1997 victory was greeted is easy to forget now that Blair is an almost universally loathed figure in Britain. I’d like to think that everybody hates him because he invaded Iraq in order to protect us from Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out to be no more real than the Evil Spirits the witch-finders battled. But this can’t be the whole story. Blair won a general election in May 2005 pretty comfortably, long after the truth about WMDs had been revealed. The fact is Britain was mysteriously ready to believe in Blair, and then, at a certain point, it was ready to turn on him. Similarly, Hopkins went from being welcomed as a kind of saviour figure to being demonised within the space of a generation or so. Blair has since got religion and is now a practising Catholic. I knew from quite early on that I wanted my speaker to misquote the Bible as part of his attempted self-justification.
Nick Leeson is the derivatives broker whose actions led to Barings Bank (whose customers included the Queen) being declared insolvent on 26 February 1995. Leeson engaged in unauthorised speculative trading and hid his losses in secret accounts until they ran to over $1.4 billion. In the 90s, this seemed like a lot of money for a bank to lose. I am very attracted to the idea of Leeson as the Monster to Margaret Thatcher’s Frankenstein, as though the Thatcherite vision of liberated provincial youth came true, only to produce an agent of chaos who brought down a 233-year-old institution; but I realise that this is probably wishful thinking. Like Leeson, Hopkins came from what we’d call a lower-middle-class background. Hopkins was the third son of a clergyman in rural Suffolk, and the family’s respectability came from Matthew Hopkins’s grandfather, a yeoman farmer who restyled himself a gentleman after enclosing the common land upon which the poor depended. A stable English society would have checked the rise of such an ‘obscure’ figure, but the social, religious and political chaos of the civil war era allowed Hopkins to flourish, much as it did Oliver Cromwell, or William Dowsing, the puritan iconoclast. In the 1990s, it was the ethical and procedural chaos of market deregulation that gave Leeson his chance.
I don’t know whether readers outside of the U.K. will have heard of Myra Hindley. She was a serial killer, who, along with Ian Brady, kidnapped, tortured and murdered five children, burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in northern England, between July 1963 and October 1965. Brady, by his own account, was the leader, with Hindley his eager assistant. One of the strange things about the public interest in the case was the almost obsessive focus on Hindley: when I was growing up in the 80s, she seemed like a mythical figure, a bogeyman, often invoked as a symbol of the danger ‘out there’. The interest never really abated until Hindley died in prison of bronchial pneumonia in 2002. Unlike Brady, who was perceived as having been ‘born bad’, Hindley was disturbing because it was just about possible to imagine an alternative world in which she didn’t meet Brady and turned out—well, not exactly ‘normal’, but at least not homicidal. The motivations of serial killers (in real life or in fiction) are usually banal; what drives their enablers is a much more interesting question. I wanted the fanatical, inhuman Discoverer in my poem to remain a shadowy presence. His Man—the ordinary guy who fell under his spell, promulgated his myth, eased his progress, and then returned to society—would be my speaker and real subject.
These figures interested me because they are simultaneously characters in the story England tells itself, and chancers who seized an opportunity to tell a story of their own. At a certain point, through some confluence of historical and personal circumstance, they were presented with the occasion to seize control of a bigger narrative, to identify and project some aspect of their own self-image, and to implicate others in their version of events. On a smaller scale, much the same processes—projection and identification; suspicion and discovery—are practised by the speaker and implied listener of a dramatic monologue, as well as the writer and the reader.
Tags: dramatic monologue, Paul Batchelor, Poetry guest blogger
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 by Paul Batchelor.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Walt Whitman 101
A close look at everybody’s radical poet.

Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.

Beginnings
Whitman’s long road to poetic greatness seemed both unlikely and predestined. One of nine children, several of whom were named for American presidents, he left school at 11 but continued to educate himself while he apprenticed as a printer. For the first half of his life, his literary ambitions lay in journalism and fiction, and he worked for several New York newspapers. He didn’t write a book of poetry until he was 36, when, at his own expense, he first published Leaves of Grass, his great and lifelong work. Though he wrote other prose and poetry volumes over the course of his career, Whitman continually revised and reissued Leaves of Grass, adding to, removing from, rewriting, and reordering the book until his death. When Leaves was first published in 1855, it contained 12 poems; the final 1892 edition contains more than 400. His goal from the beginning was a kind of wholeness: a volume that gathered all of his work into one sustained epic.

If the size and scope of Leaves of Grass was itself audacious, its form and content were even more so. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which called for a distinctly American poetry, Whitman abandoned traditional poetic style and elevated language. He pioneered a unique type of free verse that combined spontaneous, prosaic rhythms with incantatory repetition that he found in the Old Testament; with it, he found a form to match his great subject: the unity and diversity of the limitless American self.

Walt Whitman, Kosmos
His earliest and most fundamental work, “Song of Myself,” carries egalitarianism to its further extent. In long lines and ecstatic catalogues, Whitman embraces everything and everyone—good and bad, male and female, free and not—as equal. Celebrating the individual as both a product of and vessel for the multitude, Whitman adopted the persona of the kosmos, a kind of visionary or seer, and channeled the voices of America—“I am the hounded slave,” he writes provocatively at one point. His praise of the carnal and corporeal was likewise provocative. As he proclaims in “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman saw the body and the soul as commensurate and touch as the basis for all personal and political connections.

Ebb Tide
Though it gained him a handful of admirers and detractors, the first edition of Leaves of Grass sold very poorly. In the years following its publication, Whitman lived an unsettled, bohemian life, and his work took a melancholic, personal turn. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” for example, tells the tale of his artistic birth but roots it in death and loss, and the invitation in his earlier “Song of the Open Road” stands in stark contrast to his warning in “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” that he is “not what you supposed.”

Skeptical as they can be, the poems of this period include some of Whitman’s most revolutionary work. “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” is a doubtful and inconclusive poem that prefigures the Modernist movement, and his “Calamus” sequence, first printed in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, is historic in its treatment of same-sex attraction and relationships. In comparison to the excited and explicit sexuality of his earlier work, “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing” and “A Glimpse” are meditative, even plaintive in tone. But in lingering on feelings that were, at the time, too obscene to mention, Whitman introduced a language of queer love that, as critics Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price write, was essential to the development of gay literature.

Drum-Taps
As befits his signature blending of self and state, the Civil War marked a major turning point in Whitman’s career. Traveling first to the front lines to visit his enlisted brother, and then onto Washington, DC, where he made a home during the war, Whitman became a troubadour of the battlefield. In “Beat! Beat! Drums!” he sings of the war’s inevitability, and poems such as “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” acutely capture its horrors. “The Wound-Dresser” describes Whitman’s remarkable experiences at military hospitals, where he nursed thousands of wounded soldiers and befriended many.

These years took a toll on Whitman: one of his brothers died, another was captured, and he watched as one of his dearest infatuations had his leg amputated. But these years also brought the publication of his book Drum-Taps and two of his most widely known poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!,” both written in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated at the end of the war.

The Good Gray Poet
Whitman was an avowed rabble-rouser—his abolitionist politics and explicit poetry lost him several jobs—but his image shifted in his later years to something more stately and sanctified. Despite declining health and financial instability, Whitman continued to write and even began to enjoy a certain amount of literary celebrity. He received numerous distinguished visitors, including Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oscar Wilde, at his home in Camden, New Jersey, where he relocated in 1873 after a stroke.

Inspired more and more by science and engineering, Whitman wrote poems such as “Passage to India,” which hails the opening of the Suez Canal and the rapidly globalizing world, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” which stages the conflict between scientific reason and cosmic experience. He continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass and worked on several prose projects, including Specimen Days, which is an unconventional autobiography, and “Democratic Vistas,” an essay about Reconstruction-era America.

If the tone of his poetry grew increasingly laudatory, in “Vistas,” Whitman is at his most critical, excoriating a political culture “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood” and “mal-administration.” But if America’s promise remained (or remains) unfulfilled, Whitman’s poetry reminds readers, even today, of democracy’s continuing potential.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.

^^^^ This alone makes him in my top ten favorite poets list !!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...ndation.org%29

ESSAY
The Locals
Why Spoon River Anthology still resonates 100 years later.

BY STEFAN BECK

“I hate small towns,” Lenny Bruce reportedly said, “because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.” There was a time when I found this line funny and true, but then I had the good fortune to move to a small town in upstate New York. My town has proven a greater source of fascination than any true city I’ve lived in—though the reasons were not entirely clear to me until I reread Edgar Lee Masters’s masterpiece, Spoon River Anthology, which turns 100 years old this year and has never once been out of print.

Spoon River is a doubtful advertisement for small-town life. “I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,” Archibald Higbie declares in his poem’s opening line. Modeled on the epigrams of the Anthologia Graeca, it is a series of more than 200 epitaphs spoken by the dead of Spoon River’s cemetery. (Spoon River is based on the towns of Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois, where Masters was raised.) Free in death to speak truthfully, spurn propriety, and spill secrets, these ghosts conjure a vision of a small town very much at odds with its own idealized, pastoral self-image.

Almost every kind of unpleasantness imaginable is present in these poems. Some Spoon River residents lead long lives before coming to ruin. Some lose life’s lottery at the outset: “Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor’s hand / Against my boy’s head as he entered life,” grieves the speaker in “State’s Attorney Fallas,” “Made him an idiot.” Some of Spoon River’s talking dead are children. Charlie French recalls being cut down by a toy gun in the midst of great happiness: “The lemonade stands were running / And the band was playing, / To have it all spoiled / By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my hand.”

Some of Spoon River’s talking dead are children. Charlie French recalls being cut down by a toy gun in the midst of great happiness: “The lemonade stands were running / And the band was playing, / To have it all spoiled / By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my hand.”

The darker consequences of sex loom large. “I would have been as great as George Eliot,” says Margaret Fuller Slack, but her ambitions suffocate beneath the burden of raising eight children: “Sex is the curse of life!” Slack thunders. The devastating “Nellie Clark” relates a life ruined by reverberations of the speaker’s rape when she was eight years old. In “Minerva Jones,” “Doctor Meyers,” and “Mrs. Meyers,” readers commiserate with three villagers who suffer death or disgrace because of botched, illicit abortions.

Frank talk about sex—not to mention adultery, prostitution, and abortion—was far from common in 1915, and the public was shocked. John Erskine wrote in the November 1922 North American Review of encountering a minister who “could not give his approval to the Spoon River Anthology, brilliant though it was; he could approve of no book that portrayed fornication.” Spoon River was “the sex-shocker, the Peyton Place of its day,” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in The New Leader in 1963.
Masters wrote these poems in free verse, still novel—even disturbingly so—at the time. Lawrence Gilman, considering Spoon River in North American Review in June 1915, called the voices of Masters’s speakers “bald, flat, and uncouth.” Masters never tried to pretty up the speech of ordinary people. Their stories, Gilman contended, were “often as rank and candid as the records of a police-court.”

But some found the candor of Masters’s characters refreshing. Alice Corbin Henderson, writing about Spoon River for Poetry in June 1915, argued that “despite the general sense of tragedy” in the book, Masters “makes life seem precious” as well as “humorous, squalid and noble at the same time.” Ezra Pound was also impressed. “At last,” he wrote, “the American West has produced a poet strong enough to weather the climate, capable of dealing with life directly.”

Masters makes small-town life come alive in its variety and specificity and unruliness. His masterstroke was to put these simple folk six feet under. Even though his characters are dead, he was able to emphasize their human energy. His “dead” characters seem more fully alive for speaking from the soil.

This pursuit of realism and psychological nuance should not have been controversial, but it was; Masters’s real project was to show that difficult lives are not failed ones but rather ones whose rewards are earned at greater cost. Spoon River feels neither bitter, as does much of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), on which it was a major influence, nor dated and gimmicky, as the short stories in Charles Jackson’s 1950 The Sunnier Side do. It is easy to forget that although Spoon River’s conceit necessitates depicting many downfalls and deaths, its monologuists also recount ambition and pride, comic episodes and welcome reversals, passion and love. Many endings in Spoon River feel like natural parts of life, not true tragedies.

In “Richard Bone,” a carver of headstones has a career that outlasts his self-respect; the longer Bone lives among the people of Spoon River, the more readily he sees through the dishonest epitaphs his customers order: “But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel / And made myself party to the false chronicles / Of the stones.” That Bone’s guilt can be read as either noble or comically overwrought—or both, frankly—is frankly typical of Masters’s complex and humane attitude toward his creations.

Indeed, many of Masters’s speakers are both tragic and figures of fun, self-pitying but nevertheless making compelling points. In “Daisy Fraser,” the prostitute asks, “Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon / Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received” for manipulating public opinion and “Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge / Helping anyone except the ‘Q’ railroad, / Or the bankers?” Daisy maintains that she “never was taken before Justice Arnett / Without contributing ten dollars and costs / To the school fund of Spoon River!” Similarly, in “Judge Somers,” the judge, who “knew Blackstone and Coke / Almost by heart,” fumes about the fact that the town drunkard “has a marble block, topped by an urn, / Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical, / Has sown a flowering weed?”

Masters’s poems, his men and women, endure because they possess blunt force and human nuance. Spoon River shows humanity in microcosm: “Like Chaucer’s pilgrims,” critic Ernest Earnest wrote, “the 244 characters who speak their epitaphs represent almost every walk of life.” Earnest attributed the book’s immediate popularity to “shock of recognition. Here for the first time in America was the whole of a society which people recognized—not only that part of it reflected in writers of the genteel tradition.” He was writing in 1967 and clearly found Spoon River anything but dated.

In his 1992 introduction to an annotated volume of Spoon River Anthology, John Hallwas went a bit further toward identifying Spoon River’s appeal for modern readers; he addressed a tension at the heart of “the myth of America”—that is, its “contradictory thrusts toward individualism and community.” Spoon River is about not only community but also the challenges of knowing and being known by others. As the poet Maurice Manning recently put it, Spoon River belongs to a category of populist poetry that considers “what it is to just be human, and to have imperfections and failings and desperation and joy and love.” For that, it will always feel contemporary.

Indeed, Spoon River has inspired and likely will go on inspiring many contemporary adaptations—and mutations. The Italian musician Fabrizio De André released an album based on Spoon River, Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo, in 1971. Steve Goodman sang “Spoon River” on his 1975 album Jessie’s Jig and Other Favorites. A number of composers, including Andrew Downes, David Garner, Lita Grier, and Wolfgang Jacobi, have set Spoon River poems to music. There is even an alt-country album by Richard Buckner based on it. A theatrical production of Spoon River was performed at Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood Cemetery in 2011. Perhaps most improbably, the book was made into a computer game: “There are ghosts in the graveyard who are unable to rest because of unresolved issues in their former lives. Your task will be to end their suffering by performing tasks that resolve those issues.”

A century on, we contemporary readers are at an advantage. Because we do not flinch at subject matter that scandalized the reading public of Masters’s day, we may read Spoon River not as morbidly fixated on the ugly side of life but simply as attentive to all of life’s aspects. Masters’s speakers seize on moments or experiences whose deeper significance an outside observer could never guess, and Masters calls those moments to life with language that is beautiful without being flowery or self-conscious.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This morning we heard the very sad news that poet and UMass professor James Tate has died at the age of 71. Gazettenet reports:
Acclaimed poet James Tate, a distinguished professor in the English department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, died Wednesday evening, according to a university spokesman. He was 71.
Tate is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including “Worshipful Company of Fletchers,” which won the 1994 National Book Award. His 1991 collection “Selected Poems” won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the William Carlos Williams award.
Tate was a long-time contributor to Poetry, with his first appearance reaching back to the July 1967 issue with “The Whole World’s Sadly Talking to Itself —W. B. Yeats” and “Pity Ascending with the Fog.” His last appearance in the magazine occurred in the January 2005 issue with “Spiderwebs.” Throughout his career Tate’s poetry was championed for its character-driven surrealism, while his teaching was foundational for a variety of poets who attended UMass Amherst.
Head here to read a selection of Tate’s poetry. And to hear Tate reading his work, tune in to this Essential American Poets podcast featuring a reading at the Library of Congress in 1976.
For his legions of readers and students, he’ll be missed.
Tags: James Tate, Obituary
Posted in Poetry News on Thursday, July 9th, 2015 by Harriet Staff.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
A Tapestry for George Starbuck
BY KATHRYN STARBUCK
George Starbuck
George Starbuck
Note: Poetry first published George Starbuck in January 1960, and over the course of nearly three decades he published almost two dozen poems in the magazine. These include elegies, concrete poems, and many others you can find in our online archive. George Starbuck would have been 84 this month. His wife, Kathryn Starbuck, wrote the following post on his poems and the couple’s friendship with the late Patrick Leigh Fermor. Her poem “Sylvia En Route to Kythera” appears in our June 2015 issue.
Alas, I rarely read poetry. But I was married to poetry for nearly three decades in the person of George Starbuck. George was born June 15, 1931. His ten-book body of work was cut short by a twenty-two-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease that ended with his death at home at age 65 in 1996. While thinking of George and his work, I’ve been re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli, 1966, his masterpiece about northern Greece, Byron, poetry, and modern Greek history. Leigh Fermor, the incomparable British prose stylist, lived in Greece, and died at 96 in 2011. He was a literary warrior-scholar who loved poetry. As a commando in the British special forces, he became the hero of the Battle of Crete in World War II when he kidnapped Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe.
He admired George’s poetry. Leigh Fermor sent George a fan letter about his poem “A Tapestry for Bayeux” when his first book, Bone Thoughts, came out in 1960. He invited George to visit him in Greece.
George and I stayed with him for a memorable day and night at his home in Kardamyli in the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnesus in the early 1980s. I sang him a song a young Greek shepherd had sung to me in the Tayegetus mountains, which Leigh Fermor had hiked for decades. I sang it in Demotiki and in the rough translation I had fashioned. My father was born in Greece in the Peloponnesus. The Nazis extirpated his family in 1944. Leigh Fermor and I talked late into the night about the Massacre of Meligala. (I published an essay, “Singing for Patrick Leigh Fermor,” in 2014 in The Sewanee Review.)
Leigh Fermor sang folk songs in eight languages. He favored back formations, artificial formations, portmanteau words. I believe my husband had only five languages. George was a master of poetic forms. His Bayeux tapestry poem is a 156 line display in dactylic monometer about the Normandy invasion. In virtuosic metrics, it also conceals bawdy versified digs at a well-known anthologist of the day, Oscar Williams. Leigh Fermor and George were fans of the French Oulipists.
George and Leigh Fermor held a glittering exchange of hilarious rapid-fire shots back and forth like world-class tennis players of their favorite poetic forms, poetic short hand, and archaic forms. They kept outdoing each other, like mountain climbers racing for Everest, with examples of what worked best and what almost never worked for Shelley, but did work for Byron, and usually for Keats and always for Pope…while I, like the journalist I was at the time, took notes.
Nearly five and one-half feet wide and five inches tall, George’s “Elegy in a County Church Yard,” a landscape of shaped tombstone poems, is thought to be the world’s widest concrete poem. Leigh Fermor declared himself dumbstruck, awestruck, and more when he received a copy of it.
Here is an excerpt from the ending of Fermor’s Roumeli:
The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know: the limitless sweep and throb of prosody, the flux and reflux of hexameters scanned by winds and currents and accompanied, for its escort of accents,
for the fall of its dactyls
the calm of its spondees
the run of its tribrachs
the ambiguity of its trochees
and the lash of its anapaests;
for the flexibility of accidents,
the congruence of syntax
and the confluence of its crasis;
for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,
for the halt of caesurae and the flight of the digamma,
for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,
for its liquid syllables and the collusion of diphthongs,
for the receding tide of proparoxytones
and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with
subscripts,
for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,
for the economy of synecdoche,
the compression of hendiadys
and the extravagance of its epithets,
for the embrace of zeugma,
for the abruptness of asyndeton
for the swell of hyperbole
and the challenge of apostrophe,
for the splash and the boom and the clamour
and the echo and the murmur of onomatopoeia
And here is the beginning of George’s 156-line “A Tapestry for Bayeux”:
Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
arches a
rocketry
wickerwork:
involute
laceries
lacerate
indigo
altitudes,
making a
skywritten
filigree
into which,
lazily,
LCTs
sinuate,
adjutants
next to them
eversharp-
eyed, among
delicate
battleship
umbrages
twinkling an
anger as
measured as
organdy.

After George died, I edited his final book of poems, Visible Ink (2002), then The Works (2003), a selection of his best work. When I turned sixty, I wrote my first poem. Greece and grief, the Tayegetus mountains of the Peloponnesus, my father and the Nazis echo throughout my first book Griefmania. I sent a copy of it to Leigh Fermor in 2006. His response brought me to my knees.
Tags: George Starbuck, Kathryn Starbuck, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Poetry magazine archives
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 by Kathryn Starbuck.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.contemporaryamericanvoices.com


July’s Featured Poet – Sarah Brown Weitzman
July 1, 2015 in Contemporary American Voices, Literature, Poetry, Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: Sarah Brown Weitzman | Leave a comment
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________

Sarah Brown Weitzman-



WHEN I WAS YOUNG

our a radio was a substantial piece of furniture
and the telephones had a rotary dial.
The refrigerator freezer was the size of a shoebox
My father wound his watch every evening before
he went to bed. His La Salle car had a running board.

At the movies there was a double feature, one
coming attraction, a news reel and an aged matron
with a flashlight who shined it on you if you misbehaved
and hauled herself up the stairs when the boys
in the balcony threw their chewed gum down on us.

When my grandmother died a telegram was delivered
right to our front door by the brother
of the girl who worked in the 5 & 10 cent store.
Everyone wore black to her funeral even though
they weren’t related. My mother said the word,
divorcee, in a whisper when a cousin arrived. Copies
of the death certificate were made with carbon paper

I remember when our doctor made house calls.
A dollar allowance went a very long way
because with a penny I could buy twenty jelly beans
or a long strip of candy dots on paper.
My mother believed that steak was good for me
Nothing we ever bought was labeled “Made in China”
and poems rhymed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much more in the linked article but this one poem said enough for me!
It has shown how fast we walked away from naive and simple in order to embrace, fast , loose and endlessly depraved in order to get thrills and justify our sad lives!
I reject such as is now thought to be enlightenment.
The rebel in me has came full circle back to honest , country boy roots.
I can and will slay dragons before I die. You know why?
Because I must for my soul to ever rest. The reason I was spared was to one day fight.
I will write too. At least one thousand poems.
Words may have power, as much as is the TRUTH that they contain......Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...e-from-within/

[Editor’s Note: Garrett Caples delivered a version this talk at the Poetry Foundation on November 6, 2014 as part of the Harriet Reading Series. Other “Open Door” features can be found here.]


I begin with the penultimate sentence of “Theory of Retrieval,” the capstone to my recent book of essays, Retrievals:
“I admire from a distance other, perhaps grander aspects of [André] Breton—the movement leader, the concept synthesizer—but what I’ve sought to emulate as a poet-critic is his spirit of generosity to the living and the dead.” This is as much to say that I’ve never aspired to be a leader of others or an inaugurator of discourse. Indeed, “Theory of Retrieval” is something of an inside joke, for it’s simply a description of, and an account of various experiences that went into the making of, the book in which it appears. I mean, I don’t have theories. I just do things. Whatever I can get away with, according to the vagaries of my ethical compass. And whatever the drawbacks of such an approach, I’m pleased to report that, by this age, as a writer, editor, even poet, I’ve done a lot of things, things I thought needed to be done.
Notwithstanding all that, I was incautious enough to dub my latest chapbook of poems What Surrealism Means to Me, which led directly to the invitation to deliver this lecture on surrealism and contemporary poetry. The “-critic” is thus called to account for the effusions of the “poet-,” for I have hitherto never self-identified as a surrealist; rather, in the late ’90s, along with my friends Jeff Clark and Brian Lucas, I was accused by a largely forgotten academic of being a surrealist. (I think we were called, derisively, the San Francisco Surrealists.) I can’t speak for my confreres, but for my part, I wouldn’t have presumed to call myself a surrealist, because I took surrealism seriously. While I never held it against those who identified as surrealists, nor did I ever disavow surrealism, at the same time, I felt that calling yourself a surrealist had little bearing on whether or not you could achieve surrealism. Such discretion aside, however, the accusation has more or less stuck and my poetry, insofar as it’s thought about at all, tends to be considered surrealist.
Nonetheless, publishing my latest chapbook under the rubric of surrealism wasn’t a question of “giving in” to the label, but was rather a deliberate decision, as indicated by “Selfie at Delphi,” the poem-manifesto that opens What Surrealism Means to Me:
when i was a young poet, there was all this postmodern distance & irony i couldn’t abide. everyone was great at deriding what they disliked & everyone sucked at deciding what they liked. now that i’m a middle-aged poet, everyone’s vampiric, parasitic, cannibal, in the name of a look-at-me-ism that mistakes the clever for the conceptual: poetry as selfie.
what surrealism has done for me is provide dissident perspective on what otherwise nice, even reasonable employees of museums & universities tell me is cutting-edge, avant-garde, true. a spine to speak get the fuck outta here & an intelligence to back it up. surrealism’s been the light leading me through continuous yet temporary labyrinths & if you think i lit this rush from Lamantia who lit his from Breton, you’re fucking right.
On the one hand, I suppose, this looks for all the world like a midlife crisis; certainly I would never have carried on in this fashion in my youth. Fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have permitted myself in a poetic text to write so prosaically, nor would I have spoken of my own poetry so directly or invoked surrealism so explicitly. And I definitely wouldn’t have had the grandiosity to propose this lineage from Breton to Lamantia to myself. Yet here is where I find myself. What’s shifted is the context of the discussion in the poetic avant-garde. When I came of age as a poet, the avant-garde in the Bay Area was dominated by language poetry; there was a stifling orthodoxy to the conversation and it was theory-driven at the expense of poetic results. The way to change this conversation was not by writing manifestoes, for language poetry was only too ready to argue, but rather by writing more compelling poetry. If my friends and I had any impact on poetry in terms of younger writers, it was through example, by suggesting other avenues in experimental poetry than those sanctioned by language poetry.
The situation today could be no more different, to the point where I feel a mild nostalgia for language poetry; however wrongheaded I found them, the language poets were worthy opponents, and they were nothing if not sincere. Rightly or, as I maintain, wrongly, they were committed to their ideas and the poetry that flowed therefrom. With the contemporary poetry of conceptualism, however, we are confronted with a whole new animal, one that doesn’t even pretend to believe what it says. As near as I can tell, it began as a cynical land-grab by failed visual artists, using a warmed over version of turn of ’70s minimalism as a way to take out their frustrations about their creative impotence, hence the valorization of “uncreative writing.” It is, on the one hand, all about product, ways of generating product with minimal effort, and in this we can see its academic origins, for this is surely the cut-and-paste solution to the professor’s publish-or-perish problem. On the other hand, it disavows its product, insofar as the texts of conceptualism are self-declaredly meant to be discussed, not read. Conceptualism will do anything for attention, because attention is its only goal. It will not hesitate to engage in the worst forms of ambulance chasing and grave robbing, whether attaching its projects to the suicide of open access activist Aaron Swartz or publishing a remix of the manifesto of mass murderer Elliot Rodger a mere two days after his killing spree. In this, it’s the ultimate symptom of the social media age, and social media has had a pernicious effect on the poetry world. A bubbling cauldron of clickbait and petty resentments, social media has created a permanent MFA class of poet, one concerned chiefly with parsing the activities of his or her peers as opposed to pursuing the ancient art we profess to practice. Poetry is elsewhere.
But why invoke something as unfashionable as surrealism to oppose conceptualism? As a poet, I always feel the need to........................................

Read more at the link provided above. Tooooooooo long to post all here. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.montevidayo.com

Montevidayo

about contributors
New edition of The Journal Petra
by James Pate on Apr.20, 2015, under Uncategorized
There’s an excellent new edition of The Journal Petra out now.
Work by such Montevidayo favorites as Kim Hyesoon and Lucas de Lima can be found there,
along with many other great poems.

-----

Johnny Payne reviews The Sugar Book
by Johannes on Apr.17, 2015, under Uncategorized
Over at Cleaver Magazine, Johnny Payne has written a very thoughtful review of The Sugar Book.
In particular, I appreciate the way he – like Carleen Tibbetts in her review in American
Microreviews- thinks through the kind of “barrage” that gave Publisher’s Weekly such issues
with Haute Surveillance. Payne acknowledges that he felt the urge to cut out some of the
stuff from the book but instead of this leading him to knee-jerk attack/dismiss the way
Publisher’s Weekly did, he actually thinks about
his reaction.
Here’s an excerpt:
This is exactly what Kant meant when he described the sublime as a rapid alternation between
the fear of the overwhelming and the peculiar pleasure of seeing that overwhelming overwhelmed:
a raging storm that “takes our breath away.” This book is full of a genetic hybrid of Billie
Holiday’s strange fruit—as a song that became an ekphrastic poem—the ugly philosophical
object of contemplation transmuted, by its very violence, into something lyrical.
Pablo Neruda played with this idea back in 1925, with feismo, the art of the ugly:
el perfume de las ciruelas que rodando a tierra
se pudren en el tiempo, infinitamente verdes.
the perfume of plums that rolling to the ground
rot in time, infinitely green.

The Sugar Book is a full-on assault on the senses, the sharp point of a blunt instrument. I don’t think anyone would accuse this book of subtlety. Its virtue is precisely its overkill. Excess, at its best, becomes a form of complexity. The outrage, while often smirking, runs deep, forcing a core of sincerity into what might easily have become a flippant, cynical take on urban ennui, as I feared when facing such crackling ironic titles as “At the Shrine for the Dead Starlet,” or “ The Heart of Glamour.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1581015.ece

‘Man in a Bar’
by Jenny Joseph; introduced by Andrew McCulloch
Published: 14 July 2015

When she was seventeen, Jenny Joseph heard the story of how Federico García Lorca, walking through a strange town, heard a prostitute singing a song. Stopping to listen, he found the words were from one of his own poems. “This at once for me became the ideal”, she wrote in the introduction to a selection of her poems in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets (1985). “It seemed the absolute of fame that what one wrote should be so much a part of the world as to rise to the lips of any . . . Joan, Liz or Mary”. This was an ambition she certainly achieved with her poem “Warning” (“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . . ”) which, in 1997, beat “Do Not Go Gentle”, “Stop All the Clocks” and “Not Waving but Drowning” to be voted Britain’s favourite post-war poem.

“Warning” is from Joseph’s second collection Rose in the Afternoon (1974), described by Peter Porter as “a sort of walled garden of the suburban imagination, a place part wrecked by cats and disappointment and part illuminated by the light that Samuel Palmer saw over Shoreham”. But her “wholly original” way of mixing “mystery and plain statement” was already evident in The Unlooked-For Season (1960) – in which “Man in a Bar” appeared – a collection also full of “deserted towns, deserted homes, deserted seas, deserted hearts” (A. Alvarez). The poem clearly springs from her lifelong interest in the Robert Browning vein of first-person narrative verse (although it may also owe something to the fact that she was married to a publican) and anticipates the dramatic monologues of U. A. Fanthorpe and Carol Ann Duffy. It reveals Joseph’s fine ear for emotional cadence. Each section opens with a brave attempt to answer an implied question as positively as possible. The speaker’s rueful honesty becomes increasingly visible through his threadbare claims, while his urbanity – even if it is not very convincing – has hardened into more than just a mask. Even his howl of anguish at the end is all but mute.



Man in a Bar


You see I have been here a long time now
And though the work I came for was years ago finished
It is an easy country to stay on in.
I have got used to the way of certain things here.
They can be absurdly irritating at times
But I get on quite well, really quite well with the people.
And then, they take you for granted. And there’s the sun
And the night air in summer. There are the Southern roses.
I am at ease in these frequented ruins
And here at least I have my place as exile.

Oh, I hear quite often from people at home;
Sometimes old friends come out here: I know the place well
And I’m glad to prove of use. I like to see them
But many have married now, and with others I talk
Only of that small time so long ago
When we knew each other; every one, growing old
Grows old with different ruins, different memories,
Different deaths to recall at the sudden sad hour
When, having talked too quickly, each falls silent.

I have become rather lazy about new people
And . . .

No, I suppose there’s nothing to stop me returning
Though my brother’s family has left and I’ve nowhere to go
Where I could stay with ease. I could buy a ticket
Between Thursday and Friday, as they say. There’s nothing to keep me
Except what I create. Ah, to go home . . .

Love is not logical, but has its own
Peculiar philosophy. I know
I shall stay here now.

Whether I regret it, this habit of life that keeps me
Inevitably within its circle, inevitably an exile?
Towards the end of the season, when visitors go
Back to their cooler lands, when sometimes I have
An amusing letter from one reaching home who finds
The garden full of young fruit, goes picnics with friends
I once went with, I, in the splendid South
Could break my heart with longing. I do not go near
The station at such times for there are too many
People who go home.
Usually it is in the season before the storms
And had I not, long since, lost all tears
I could weep enough to bring on thunder.
JENNY JOSEPH (1957)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Found this in one of my meandering searches of new poetry sites, blogs and misrepresentations!
Ending verse struck me as being funny as hell, so I share it here.
O', how many times have I felt the same way about certain people! -Tyr

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://ecstaticdoggerel.blogspot.com

And one day the boy came back, and the tree was so happy she could barely speak.

"Come, boy, come climb my trunk and have fun again!" she whispered.

"I am too old and sad to have fun," said the boy. "The world is not fun. I need a boat, to sail far away from here. Can you give me a boat?"

"A boat?" said the tree. She didn't know what to say. Only that morning there had been news of wildfires, and drought, and starvation, and beheadings, and mass extinctions, and a bunch of walruses with no ice left in the ocean for resting had come ashore in one giant tusky bawling mass.

"Were you saying something?" asked the boy, checking his stock listings on his smartphone. "Yeah, a boat. My life isn't all sunshine and butterflies and bears scratching their backs on me, like yours."

And the tree looked at him a long time. Then she sighed. "I wish I had not given you all my branches," she said. "Because now I cannot beat you violently with them like you deserve, you whiny little dickhead."

POSTED BY M. C. ALLAN (CARRIE, TO MOST) AT 9:02 AM NO COMMENTS:

[Balu]

... so I share it here. ...

This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling.

Thank you for reading and understanding poetry my friend.
Poetry is meant to be a gift to all that read it. Always the poet's hope is it helps the reader in some way.
Life must be about giving back and helping others. For if not then it fails to be divinely inspired.
We that can and do write with that in mind are rewarded when we may find it has help inspire somebody in some positive way.
As to memories of youth, we all seem to have the happy ones stored for use in our daily lives and anything that brings them out to be remembered yet again is a treasure IMHO. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250736
ESSAY
As Ever
The letters of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti chart a 40-year friendship and two storied careers.

The story now feels nearly inevitable. In 1955, Allen Ginsberg moved into an apartment in the San Francisco North Beach area, just a few blocks away from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Bookshop. Ginsberg showed the fledging publisher his work, and Ferlinghetti was intrigued. He attended an event at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, where Ginsberg recited part of “Howl” for the first time. A few days later, Ferlinghetti sent the poet a telegram: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he cabled, echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legendary note to Walt Whitman. “When do I get the manuscript of ‘Howl’?”

So began a decades-long relationship between the two men, as writer and publisher and as friends. From 1955 until Ginsberg’s death in 1997, they exchanged letters on matters large and small, from the 1957 obscenity charges that Ferlinghetti faced as the publisher of Howl to Ginsberg’s precarious finances (“I’m broke, dumb, writeless and nowhere. Send on royalties as soon as you can,” wrote Ginsberg in 1958). They sent each other thoughtful editorial notes and breezy accounts of their far-flung travels. In the early years, letters were their principal mode of communication, and their correspondence tracks not only the arc of their storied careers but also the palpable affection and respect the two men had for each other.

City Lights has just published a collection of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti’s selected correspondence, I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career, edited by Bill Morgan. What follows are excerpts from that volume.



June 22, 1956: Allen Ginsberg onboard the USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton in Seattle to Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

Well what news? I am in Seattle, will be here over weekend and thru next Friday, will return to San Francisco next weekend for a few days — arrive sometime Sunday I expect, around the 30th or 31st. If therefore you got or will get proofs hold on to them, I’ll look them over myself.
Generally speaking the Greyhound poem [“In the Baggage Room at Greyhound”] stinks on ice, at least the end does — that won’t last no 1000 years — I had a nightmare about it standing on the prow several days ago. I dunno what to do, haven’t written anything better on it since leaving town. Maybe later.
If you call Kenneth by phone tell him I’ll see him in few days, when return, Rexroth that is.
Spending much time gazing at the “misty vast nebulous and never-to-be-knowable clouds,” and reading Shakespeare.

As ever,
Allen





In early August, Ferlinghetti sent an advance copy of the bound book Howl and Other Poems to Ginsberg onboard his ship near the Arctic Circle.

ca. August 9, 1956: Ginsberg onboard the USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry

Received the copy of the book you sent me promptly — and was excited to see it. Everything worked out fine with the typography — it looks much better this way and it seems to have been real cheap to do — $20 is nuthin. I shuddered when I read the poetry tho, it all seems so jerry-built sloppy and egocentric, most of it. “Greyhound” looks fine, I’m glad you told me to put it in. Reading it all through I’m not sure it deserves all the care and work you’ve put into it and the encouragement you’ve given me, in fact to tell you the truth I am already embarrassed by half of it, but what the hell, thank you anyway for all your courtesy and I hope few people will see it with such jaded eyes as I do, tho I guess it’s best the poems have a truthful fate than an over-sympathetic one. I wonder if we will actually sell the thousand copies.[…]
“Transcription of Organ Music” I still like, I’m not sorry. It’s not revised so it’s not bad “Art” like the rest of the writing. Its ineptness is its own and nature’s not mine.

[unsigned]





After Ginsberg returned from the Merchant Marines, he and Ferlinghetti communicated in person for a time. In the fall of 1956, Ginsberg took a trip to Mexico with Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky, among others, then went to New York City. During this time, Ferlinghetti reprinted 1,500 copies of Howl and Other Poems.

January 15, 1957: Ginsberg in New York to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

January 9 letter received, as well as clipping from [San Francisco] Chronicle. I was going to write [Norman K.] Dorn, the reviewer, a letter but I tried several, each a different tone and they all sounded goofy so I gave up. If you see him ever say we collectively rarely have lice, and I hope he drops dead of clap. No, wasn’t really discouraged, just realized what a weird place New York book reviewing works like. [ . . . ]
Listen, great tragedy. My friend Lucien Carr objects violently to using his name in dedication. His reasons are varied and personal and real enough for him — I had never asked his OK, and he has reasons why not. What can be done about omitting that line in the dedication in the second printing? Is it too late for immediate action?
It’s my fuck up, but I have to straighten it out. Therefore if the whole thing is printed and bound already, have it done all over again and bill me for the second printing. It’s about $100 more or less?
[…]
What did you think of [Kenneth] Koch’s poem “Fresh Air” in I.E. [The Cambridge Review]? I thought very good. Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky and I went out to visit W.C. Williams who said he’d review the book — probably for Times I guess — so (this being Gregory’s book Gasoline) with [Randall] Jarrell intro that ought to set up Gregory. Long funny afternoon we all got drunk and my father* drove us home here raving and weeping about St. Carlos. He dug Jack and his wife also. Gregory unmentioned above was there too, I forgot. He read mad silly poems to Williams and Williams loved him, but worried what he’d be like “in forty years.” [ . . . ]

As ever, Allen

*Louis Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg’s father, was a poet and schoolteacher in New Jersey.

February 5, 1957: Ferlinghetti in San Francisco to Ginsberg in New York

Dear Allen,

Howl will be delayed an extra two weeks due to deletion of Lucien Carr, and I have been completely out of [copies] for almost a month. However, it should be here in bulk by February 20 at the latest. I caught them in the last stage — the book had already been folded and gathered, but not stitched. Therefore, one section could still be taken out, reprinted, and regathered, etc . . . The total extra cost comes to $25, which I could use as soon as possible, to pay the bill. I have back orders from all over the country now — including big orders for Paper Editions. [Ted] Wilentz at the Eighth Street Bookshop in New York has ordered 100 copies. I sent him the last five I had. Gotham Book Mart has also put in a big standing order, and I sent them five of yours as a stop-gap. [ . . . ]
We all got photographed for Life Sunday night at a mass reading at Kenneth’s [Rexroth] . . . I am sick of all these con operations, and I hope every photographer in the country crawls in a hole somewhere and drops dead. It all has nothing to do with poetry. I am not sending my poetry anywhere unsolicited, and frankly I don’t give a good shit if they come and get it or not. I wasted enough post on Partisan twenty years ago . . . However, as for your book, I will continue to push and will send copy to Lisa Dyer at Hudson Review as soon as I get a copy to send. Poetry writes me that they will include it in a review early this summer . . . by [Frederick] Eckman [ . . . ]

Best, regards, etc, Larry

March 3, 1957: Ginsberg in New York to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

Have investigated but as far as I know, the book can’t be copyrighted here because printed in England. If you know a way it can be, please do so in my name and send me bill for what it costs.
[…]
If necessary, can copyright it in your name or City Lights or whoever, with the understanding that it’s my copyright to use as I wish and get whatever loot I can. Though actually I guess no copyright is necessary and it’s all just a bunch of bureaucratic papers so no point actually in doing anything, nobody has anything to steal except in paranoiac future lands.
[…]
What’s happening? I’ve now extricated myself from publicity work and am sitting quietly reading Blake and Mayakovsky — do you know the latter? — really the end, mad public prophetic style.

I hear [Charles] Olson is there, what’s he like and what’s happening socially?

As ever, Allen

ca. March 1957: Ferlinghetti in San Francisco to Ginsberg in New York

Dear Allen,
The hell with contracts — we will just tell them you have standing agreement with me and you can give me anything you feel like giving me on reprints whenever you get back to States and sit in Poetry Chairs in hinterland CCNYs* and are rich and famous and fat and fucking your admirers and getting reprinted in all of seldenrod-man’s anthologies,** until then, natch, the loot shud be yours since as you say I am getting famous as your publisher anyway. Do you want more Howls and other Pocket Poets sent now (which ones?) and charged against you? How many? . . .

[…]
Will soon send addition on Howl sales to-date. OK? G’bye . . .

larry

*City College of New York.