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Unread 03-11-2012, 04:20 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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Default Adam Kirsch on William Carlos Williams

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...gination=false

Has anyone read the books he's reviewing?

Last edited by Andrew Frisardi; 04-27-2012 at 11:05 PM.
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Unread 03-11-2012, 07:31 AM
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Maryann Corbett Maryann Corbett is offline
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I'm about two chapters into the Leibowitz book, because I'm supposed to be reviewing it for The Arts Fuse. Though Kirsch doesn't actually say much here about the book itself (!), I agree with what he says: the book is a melding of close reading with biography, and it's completely candid about Leibowitz's view of the weaknesses that can appear in Williams's work.

I'm a little disturbed by the sort of psychoanalysis Leibowitz is doing through the poems. I need to get further into it to make a more certain judgment.
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Unread 03-11-2012, 11:19 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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Thanks, Maryann. I was intrigued by Kirsch's references to Paul Mariani's 1981 biography of Williams, which I'd like to read. I also wonder if anyone here knows that one and how it is.
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Unread 03-11-2012, 03:29 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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I read the Mariani biography of Williams some time back. I remember it as solid, workmanlike and a little dull. In fairness, Williams lived a relatively uneventful life.
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Unread 03-28-2012, 04:51 AM
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Tony Barnstone Tony Barnstone is offline
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I haven't yet read these books, but have 'em on order now! Thanks for the lead.

I did think that Kirsch was right on about most everything he said about WCW, but maybe is slightly unfair in moments. Yes, WCW failed often and regularly, sometimes for years and years at a stretch. But when he hit it, he hit it out of the park, as in the later very personal triadic line poems without which we would never have had the confessional poems of Lowell and Plath and Sexton, not to mention the Beat poetics of Ginsberg and Creeley, and those who followed, from C.K. Williams and Philip Levine to Tony Hoagland and Kim Addonizio.

If WCW seems non-intellectual, it is in part because he composed with a sense of his reader's intelligence, burying his treasures to be unearthed instead of declaring them outright. But, really, this is like the early critics (even Ezra Pound, who should have known better) who thought Robert Frost a crackerjack country bumpkin whose meter was clumsy and off. This late in the game, we should know better about WCW, as we do about Frost.

If we focus on a quick, very early, one-off imagist poem like "The Red Wheelbarrow," instead of about a complex and interesting later poem such as "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" or "The Orchestra," it will certainly make him seem a much less interesting poet than he is. I'm glad Hirsch acknowledges WCW's ongoing attempts to incorporate the wild strains of modernism into his verse. In fact, if WCW fails, he fails because he is relentlessly experimental for much of his life, and the true battle in his work is between his rage for clarity and his rage for a poetry of the avant garde.

Well, okay, I'm ranting.

See ya,

Tony
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Unread 03-28-2012, 03:07 PM
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Michael F Michael F is offline
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Tony, it’s always a pleasure to read your rants!

I’m no expert on WCW, he’s not my favorite poet, but I think he was entirely correct in his distrust of Eliot. IMHO, poetry is at least as much the truth of the heart as the truth of the head; Eliot missed, mistook, the truth of the heart.

I’ve always thought that, for all his celebrated religious conversion, for all his embrace of orthodoxy, Eliot was a heretic -- a Manichee, to be precise. One must also love the world, somebody in it. It seems to me that WCW intuited this deeply, and “Asphodel” is the flower and testament. (So, in a smaller way, is “Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say”. They convey to me an enchantment with the world.)

How natural that Auden should so have admired “Asphodel” – I think Auden understood both truths of poetry, and which must be subaltern.
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