18 April 2024
-
The central project is done. Double done, like double dutch, difficult.
Consider the word “liquidate.” To make a solid flow is to throw it out. To
wea...
1 day ago
Friday, February 22, 2008
Pre-Wax Museum
I'm using The New American Poetry in my "Poetry Since 1945" class this semester, amongst others. But it's a far less interesting book than The Young American Poets, ed. Paul Carroll (Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1968). In addition to the fascinating photos of all these folks as youngsters, it contains a (now-inconceivable) cross-section of US writers. Marvin Bell & Ted Berrigan. Kathleen Fraser next to Louise Gluck. Robert Hass and Robert Kelly. Charles Simic , Kathleen Spivack, Mark Strand, James Tate (well-groomed, overfed, button-down oxford shirt) in rapid succession; then, later, Julia Vinograd (Berkeley street character, when I was there), Diane Wakoski, and Anne Waldman (also looking mighty clean-cut). And lots of understandably unknowns as well as some whacky surprises. Anyway, it's always great to find a document of how things were, in any generation, before competing canonical scleroses impair aesthetic cognition, as they always do do, it seems.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Carroll's was the first anthology of contemporary poetry I ever came across, at my city library--it was my first exposure to Padgett, Coolidge, R. Johnson, all those people. It had an electrifying effect. I found a used copy again a couple years ago, and even though some of the material in it seems a little dull now (not the poets mentioned above, of course), it remains an important book to me.
Post a Comment