I have been thinking of the dead writers I have known… but
where to begin and how to define “know”…
I should say these are men and women I
had actual contact with… in which they stood before me or sat with me… but to
begin in no order, as if I lost the address book and who needs an address
anymore when it comes to the dead:
Hannah Green, George Garrett, Chad Walsh, Julian Green, Francis Stuart,
Bink Noll, James Liddy, Jakov Lind, W.H. Auden, Patrick Kavanagh, John Jordan,
Stephen Spender, Ralph Ellison, John Currier, Malcolm Cowley, Samuel Beckett, Richard Riordan (the Doctor to the Poets),
Carlos Fuentes, Harold Brodkey, Glenway Wescott, Johnny Greene…
And the cemetery keeps growing: Richard M. Elman, Kenneth
Burke, Pearse Hutchinson, Robert Pinget, Barbara Wright, Jorge Luis Borges,
Frank McShane, Eugenio Montale, Samuel Menashe, David Markson, Uwe Johnson, Mei Savage Brady…
But of course does it matter. The dead bury the dead. Maybe it should be the dying bury the dead or
cling to the recent dead in some hope that…
FIVE
But contrary to what experience has taught I even read new books of poetry and find myself taken by WESTERLY by Will Schutt who it turns out is the son of Christine Schutt, but it was the title poem that really caught my reading: that town in Rhode Island just over from Stonington, just in the name suggestive and concluding lines: off to Westerly,/ Rhode Island, where nirvana is a long time/coming, or untidy, unresolved, the way stupid hope won't shut up.
And I read Schutt's Italian translations and the using Leopardi and the biographical fact of a fellowship from the James Merrill House, where I would never be allowed...there in Stonington, as I am not so well connected, though I have stayed in Stonington with Pati Hill and talked with the Jones sisters--- a Fourth of July weekend--- who were reminded hearing my name of how the Irish servants shook out the sheets to welcome Armistice Day in 1918 and Bettina Bergery-- that Bettiina talked of travelling with Gaston (the guy who invented the Popular Front) who was the Vichy ambassador to Moscow, traveling with her pet monkey who...( I am not going to tell you everything in one blog post) and the Jones sisters talked about "Jimmy" who I knew could not talk to me because I was Catholic and abjured table shaking apparitions though the publisher of my books would publish Merrill's one good novel.
In Stonington the Irish were always cleaning the rooms, forever having a way with the language and of course the word hope is ever to be associated with Nadeshda Mandelstam in her first name and in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned and my first residence was in Nadeshda in Sofia on Ul. Yordan Lutibrodski...
but Will Schutt has the last words: the first two libes of Fragment from a Coptic Tunic: They draped it over the dead./That's how it survived...
And a final wish: one hopes that Will Schutt will find honest employment if he needs to do so, and never falls into becoming a professor of Creative Writing for one only has to witness the decay so evident in people like Philip Levine or Galway Kinnell, dead now for so many years though nominally still midst the living, at least according to the census-takers. To be an honest truck driver! one a gift of self-respect to one's self and talent.
OR
I did look at the latest from Gregory Orr, a professor at the University of Virginia... he is the epitome of everything that is rotten about poetry mostly in the US.. for as long as I have known him, as far back as Columbia Universoty in 1970-1-2 Orr knew how to suck up to and imitate those who themselves had matstered the art of such and in his case the master himself Mark Strand, both of them oozing opportunistic sensitivity, as Orr had the blessing of the brother killed by accident, which is always a good start and skinny little poems that could mean anything and usually nothing:::::::::: they could be or not be and he kept on and on so that he is now in RIVER INSIDE THE RIVER, that's the fakery in four words or further: It hadn't occurred/To God/To use words.
Or here is what is produced by a six figure salary from the taxpayers of the state of Virginia and the leisure that a tenured professor enjoys: To Say. Saying itself was a kind/Of seizing with love./ Eve taught him that---/She for whom prayer/Was praising/What was there---/ The world/Spread out before her/What else should she adore?
OR
All sour sour sour grapes, a pissing on parades for what else to do with the passing parade though from a great height as Celine suggests, always from a great height
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