Book of Poems

[Late]

A friendly heads-up for any in the Bay Area that might be interested ...

I'll be reading:

• in Berkeley at Cody's Books on September 25th (a Sunday), and

• at Stanford on September 26th

... it would be great to meet some of the Bay Area posters!

[Nate Dorward]

Our own Mr. Gitin is in this one!

Very nice looking chapbook, Nate. I'm interested in poems under the "sonnet limit."

I missed this thread back in January which it first popped up. Congrats on the new poetry book!

I thought I'd add that David Gitin's poem in Onsets is now available in his most recent chapbook, Passing Through. It's called "For John Tchicai".

[Late]

I thought I'd add that David Gitin's poem in Onsets is ... called "For John Tchicai".

Ahaa ... .

[AllenLowe]

I'm a little late to the discussion here, though I had poetic ambitions once upon a time - inspired by Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Babel (non poet but master of language) - love Beckett's poems, too, but have lost my ambition in this area - look forward, however, to meeting Dave Gitin when he comes up here to Portland (maine) to do a reading in June - I also find Pound's translations fascinating, and older poems like those of Sappho, plus W.C. Williams and Charles Olsen - and Sterling Brown - but it's a discipline I've lost -

[Larry Kart]

Haven’t written a poem of my own in years, but I did translate (successfully in the opinion of the man himself), the "Mottetti" of Eugenio Montale back in the early 1970s, and the translations were published in a limited edition (300 copies) by the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press, each copy signed by Montale. Because of the small size of the edition, Montale’s signature, and the cachet of Grabhorn-Hoyem in the fine-printing field -- the late Robert Grabhorn (this was the last book he worked on) and Andrew Hoyem, who now runs the Arion Press, were/are famous printers -- used copies go for about $200:

http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st...365565635_1:3:5

There’s also a newish book "Montale in English" (Penguin), edited by Harry Thomas, that includes my translation of Montale’s sequence "Dopo una Fuga" ("After a Flight"):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books

[Late]

I also find Pound's translations fascinating, and older poems like those of Sappho, plus W.C. Williams ...

Allen,

If you like Williams' Paterson, I enthusiastically recommend finding a copy of James McMichael's Four Good Things. A single poem in roughly 60 pages, I think it is to the later 20th century in Modern American poetry what Paterson was to the earlier part of the same century — it also, at least in my mind, fulfills some of the promise that I think Williams held out in his own poem but perhaps never fully achieved.

Four Good Things, in its entirety, can be found in McMichael's The World at Large.

Edited April 11, 2005 by Late

[AllenLowe]

thanks - will definitely search it out -

[Late]

thanks - will definitely search it out -

No problem. I edited my post above to link to McMichael's The World at Large.

An aside — Gerald Early, one of the more measured commentators (in my opinion at least) who often appears in Ken Burns' "documentaries," is a big McMichael fan.

[Larry Kart]

Late -- I agree, McMichael's "Four Good Things" is something else. I used to keep two copies of the paperback edition around -- one for me, one to give to interested parties or parties I could interest -- but am down to just one now.

[Late]

Late -- I agree, McMichael's "Four Good Things" is something else. I used to keep two copies of the paperback edition around -- one for me, one to give to interested parties or parties I could interest -- but am down to just one now.

Does that mean you found an interested party?

I always get excited when I find/meet someone who knows (and likes) that book. I'd have to say that it's my favorite book of poetry — period. Something about McMichael's use of the English language ... strikes me as very Tristano-like. Brilliant, and under-recognized, work.

(Whenever I see used copies of his work, which is hardly ever, I snag them up for gifts.)

Wait until Capacity comes out (Spring 2006). That book ... phew.

[sheldonm]

I just saw this thread today (where have I been ). I'll pick up a copy in the near future; Congrats Laton!

Mark

[Larry Kart]

Actually, I found at least two -- maybe three -- interested parties over the years. And of course I'd also found enough copies of the book in used book stores to put the bright idea in my head of having more than one copy around. There's something about "Four Good Things" that makes you want to pass it on, maybe because, while it is a poem without doubt, the prose sense of it -- the sheer stuff-it-has- to-say factor -- is so strong.

[Late]

There's something about "Four Good Things" that makes you want to pass it on, maybe because, while it is a poem without doubt, the prose sense of it -- the sheer stuff-it-has-to-say factor -- is so strong.

Yes, that's absolutely a compelling factor. Not too many poems about architecture (and city planning, and post-WWII economic planning, and stamp collecting, and sex manuals, and insomnia, and worrying) like that one. Do you have The World at Large? It's McMichael's "collected" work. Also, a fine introduction by Alan Shapiro.

Mark — a (sincere) thanks!

[Larry Kart]

Late -- Yes, I have "The World At Large." My favorite part of "Four Good Things" -- at least it's the part that I just couldn't believe he was attempting and pulling off the first time I read it -- is the map/walking tour section at the end. BTW, did Alan Shapiro (who used to be, maybe still is, in charge of that Phoenix Poets program) pick your book for publication? He's a fine poet and a very smart, deep, nice guy. Also BTW, I was turned on to McMichael years ago (I think well before "Four Good Things") by a shrewd, enthusiastic essay/review about him from someone whose opinion I trusted (rightly as it turned out) but whose name I can't recall. It might have been Donald Davie, because I think I remember that it was someone from another, older generation, and I sure had learned to pay attention to what Davie had to say about most anything.

[Late]

Shapiro no longer edits the series, but his taste (in my opinion) is impeccable. His introduction to The World at Large is some of the most succinct, and astute, writing on McMichael's work around. (Randolph Petillos, the current editor, selected my manuscript.)

I'd like to read that essay/review you're mentioning — though I'm not familiar with Donald Davie. (Could the author have been John Peck? Or John Matthias?) Robert Hass has a fine essay on Four Good Things in his collection of essays entitled 20th Century Pleasures — certainly worth reading — and there was a longish interview with McMichael in a (1976) volume of Chicago Review. I try to collect all the writings that are out there. If you know of more, feel free to share!

Are you familiar with Yvor Winters? I'm not so much, but should be ...

And, yes, that brilliant "map" section:

"... The world is plural

only as it shows what each of us sees differently.

Inside its different aspects it's the same.

We try to get inside what lies between

the ways it looks to us and how it is.

We want to know it. Maps are a way

of bringing into sympathy and our control

all levelings and projections on its curved replete

outside ..."

(page 54)

[joeface]

"... The world is plural

only as it shows what each of us sees differently.

Inside its different aspects it's the same.

We try to get inside what lies between

the ways it looks to us and how it is.

We want to know it. Maps are a way

of bringing into sympathy and our control

all levelings and projections on its curved replete

outside ..."

(page 54)

ambitious, an epistemological question posed in something like topographical terms, all set in a stanza.

I'm sold...

Edited April 12, 2005 by joeface

[Larry Kart]

Late -- About who wrote the essay/review that pulled my coat to McMichael way back when, I've had no luck rustling through my memory and looking through books and magazines. Again, I thought of Donald Davie because I'm pretty sure it was a figure from a previous generation whose opinion I'd learned to respect. For info on Davie, here's a place to start

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/reframe....e&author=davied

He was IMO a great (almost uniquely serious, though also at times puritanical and stuffy) critic, and at his best a fine poet. Whether you agree or not with Davie on a particular matter, he's always stimulating and usually enlightening -- a man who makes you think.

[Late]

Thanks, Larry. I will certainly be reading/learning more about Davie in the very near future (e.g. after I'm done grading that stack of drama papers ... ). The Stanford connection seems to make sense.

[Nate Dorward]

Davie's first two books of criticism (Purity of Diction & Articulate Energy) are still marvellous, stimulating reads (though I suspect like Empson's 7 types of ambiguity no-one really remembers the various types of syntax Davie enumerates after the book's closed...). His Pound book is great too, & the Hardy/British poetry book is rather awkward & angry & self-contradictory (much of the more acrid stuff arising from his bitterness over his time at Essex at his move to Stanford) but nonetheless excellent too. Carcanet reprinted both of them with supplementary essays, both highly worth getting. Davie was always very good at singling out notable writers at key points in their careers--Charles Tomlinson, Ed Dorn, Tom Raworth, FT Prince, JH Prynne, & Roy Fisher, for instance.

I don't know quite what to make of his poetry--any suggestions, Larry? I have just a selected poems on the shelf (one of those later pulped 3fers from Paladin: Ghosts in the Corridor with CH Sisson & Andrew Crozier). I'm just looking at Keith Tuma's selection in the OUP anthology (Keith is an enormous admirer of Davie's) & see that the selection is entirely short lyrics: "Hearing Russian Spoken", "Rejoinder to a Critic", "Rodez", " Out of East Anglia", "A Conditioned Air", "Inditing a Good Matter". Which skips Davie's best-known poem "Remembering the 1930s", though as a poem (rather than criticism) it's got its clutzy bits so maybe that's why it got left out.

On an unrelated note, I've just been looking at Peter Middleton's Distant Reading from U Alabama Press, & it's one of the most interesting books of criticism on poetry I've come across for a while.

Edited April 13, 2005 by Nate Dorward

[Larry Kart]

Nate -- Don't think I have the time or the inclination to do a personal Davie poems selection (though maybe I should; it might well be more important and stimulating than the other stuff I think I have to/need to do right now). Anyway, I'd trust Tuma, as smart as he obviously is and a deep-dyed Davie admirer to boot. Only Davie I can think of that I don't know and would like to look at because it might alter my point of view is his long version, "The Forests of Lithuanaia," of a work by Polish national poet of the 19th Cent., Mickiewicz. One thing I recall about Davie's poems is what I'd call their graceful clumsiness. That is, he's a man and a poet who fiercely resists, by and large, the least hint of lyrical afflatus (in part because he doesn't have that much of it in him to begin with, in part because what he does have of that in him is something he finds profoundly disturbing). I think there was a struggle going on in Davie along those lines, and when he managed to make a poem of it, the results not only could be powerful but also damn unlike just about any other poem that was being written by anyone else at the time.

[jazzbo]

Congratulations all of you on your published efforts! I'll try to seek these out and squeeze them into my reading schedule. I'm about 100 books behind right now, all bought, waiting for my attention!

I used to write poetry in my late teens and on up to about age thirty. . . when the muse fled me. I mean totally deserted me! One day I had it. . . then I couldn't come up with the magic no matter how I tried. . . . Something else took its place however, not too much later: involvement in music-making and then the love of my life.

[Nate Dorward]

I used to write poetry in my late teens and on up to about age thirty. . . when the muse fled me. I mean totally deserted me! One day I had it. . . then I couldn't come up with the magic no matter how I tried. . . . Something else took its place however, not too much later: involvement in music-making and then the love of my life.

This reminds me that I've always found it a bit odd that by & large it's expected that if you read poetry you write poetry. I don't write it, but I find that virtually everyone assumes I do (I've even have several solicitations for work) because I read it & publish it.

[jazzbo]

The flip side of that was. . . I used to write it. . . and hardly ever read it. . . I read a bit more now that I've long stopped writing it.

My favorite poet now and then is T. S. Eliot. Not even sure why. His work just pushes all my buttons.

[jazzbo]

Just came back from a poetry reading actually, sponsored by our agency's Cinco De Mayo Celebration Committee (don't laugh, it's nice we're having some exhibitions of hispanic culture, which is what this is, not just Mexican). Excellent poems written by the Nicaraugan poet Ruben Dario. Very nicely delivered readings!

[Late]

Here's a newly published anthology of American poetry — co-edited by Dana Gioia, who wrote West Coast Jazz — that I'm really liking.

Twentieth Century American Poetry

Besides containing the usual anthologized suspects, this collection also makes a point of including lesser known, though historically significant, poets. (Not everyone, of course, is included.) It's one of those books that can appeal to both newcomers and seasoned veterans. The biographical sketches accompanying each poets' entry are also particularly well-written. Just today, in fact, I was reading through the sections on Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky. It's a very good reference tool as well as introduction to some writers one might otherwise not know.