Comments on: The Aspern Papers… Spicer’s, Schwartz’s, Kafka’s – and yours?

By: david shapiro

david shapiro — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:47:38 +0000

Thank you, Don, for knowing what I was once told about the Zohar from a student of Scholem,
Matti Meged: the mystical hero is always alive and dead at the same time. Sounds like…
Hegel’s Dante. Someone at Columbia once asked me if I “liked’ Dante. I was
speechless and asked back. The professor said: I think it’s an ego trip. I said: Yes…but he invented
the ego, plunging as Hegel writes, the real into the unreal.
John Forbes, sweet Australian poet, also alive and dead, wrote a poem in which he meets O”Hara and sees that Frank is writing though dead. “WHat a guy.”
I was asked once by Richard Kostelanetz on a street in Soho who was my favorite poet. This was twenty years ago.
I said Perhaps Wallace Stevens. He said: But Stevens is dead. I said, proleptic remark, But not for me. He’s not dead for me. Nor Cezanne, nor Watteau.
Dead contempooraries was the sick label given by one encyclopedia to poets too
‘earlytdead to be disposed. Many are disappeared while living and writing intently.
But even Marx was intrigued: why do poems and scuptures last? Duchamp said they didn’t,
they often died. But Marx was thinking of the sting of Balzac, conservatibve, dead, and
more full of analysis of late capital than so many others seemingly alive.
I had not thought death had undone so many. Kalidasa, Basho, Rimbaud (and Michael
McClure once added Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow)–are they dead now?
Who tried to kill Frank O”Hara ? with their shrivlled arrows? Alive like Joe
Hill Frank said: You thought they kjlled me? what? with their shrievelled
arrows? Who let him in? The joking genius Djinn. Who tried to keep him out?
X Y and Z the lout(s). Who tried to kill Frank O”Hasra?
He died and can write, as well.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:05:40 +0000

Here’s a true story: at the last AWP, Poetry gave away issues of the magazine, an audio CD, a DVD, etc. … as well as some little buttons that had Marianne Moore’s “I, too, dislike it” on them. (Not to be confused with the tote bags from elsewhere that misquoted her: “I, too, like it.”)
A guy came up to our table, took some copies of the most recent issue, and then… picking up a button, asked me, “Hey, who said that?” I explained about Moore’s poem, and he said, “Wow, was she ever in your magazine?” I proudly said yes, after which this pleasant fellow (who identified himself as a high-school teacher) said, “You should have her in your magazine again!”
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By: Zachary Bos

Zachary Bos — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:09:20 +0000

In a way, all literature is eternally contemporary; it’s the enduring quality which defines the literary as distinct from the, say, journalistic (Ken Goldsmith’s defiance, on this blog and elsewhere, of edurance notwithstanding). The dispute here might be between that artful use of the term, and the more conventional and circumscribed use. Spicer is great, great that Poetry published him; but he isn’t contemporary, except in the former, figurative sense I set out above. Let this conciliatory pedantry be considered slack, cut.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:03:33 +0000

I don’t get the “hey, he’s dead, why are you publishing him” thing at all, but once I worked for a literary journal whose editor would ask prospective interns what poet they’d like to see published in the magazine if they had free rein, & the person said “Yeats.”
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By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:16:08 +0000

I’m going to play Don’s part and offer a quote –
“Literature can be an endless resource of forms of thought and beauty that the dead have left us. The vast possibilities of literature as the gift of the dead are some compensation for the unknowable, yet irreducibly literal fact of individual death and its resistance to meaning.”
– Susan Stewart, from this interview: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2003/interviews/S_Stewart.html
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:31:46 +0000

Geez, it’s their first retro feature in ages, cut ‘em slack. Can’t they be permitted to “make it new” every now and then? If they do one (fairly brief) Spicer portfolio, it hardly displaces the contemporary work they publish every single month.
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By: Zachary Bos

Zachary Bos — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:56:17 +0000

Are Clare and Wyatt to be compared to Spicer because they are all dead, or because their influence on later poets has been equivalently immense? I agree with Dan not in complaining about the publication of this batch of Spicer material — I don’t think Dan has a problem with seeing Poetry publishing poets — but in his assertion that Poetry should devote no less energy to publishing contemporary (i.e. writing) authors as it does to ones of historical significance. It is a more difficult thing, though, to guess who will turn out to have been as worthy of our attention as Spicer has. But then, and I put this to Dan as much as anyone, is the Spicer portfolio displacing a more contemporary poet, or, diversifying the categories of content which the magazine publishes? Contemporary poetry, portfolios of poets-past/passed, translations, letters, conversations, so it goes. I can easily endorse such an expansion. But I can’t concede to arguments that Spicer is a contemporary poet; simply isn’t the case.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:18:45 +0000

While we’re on the subject of literary pyromania, here’s another example. Navtej Sarna, in the July 4th edition of the TLS tells the story that “Kipling … once declared that no one was going to make a monkey out of him after his death.” Unlike some of the folks I listed above, though, Kipling succeeded in the destruction of thousands of his letters, and after his death his widow kept the project alive, even purchasing correspondence to him so that she could burn it! As Sarna points out, she did let an edited version of his unfinished biography to be published: it was called (truth in advertising?): Something of Myself. Many readers will not feel that much has been lost in Kipling’s case, evidently; as Sarna put it, “When everything else has been forgotten, Kipling will surely still be remembered as the great author of Kim.”
In the same issue, by contrast, there’s a review of a book on the WWI poet Isaac Rosenberg. Much of his life’s work – poems and paintings – seem to be lost forever; reviewer Peter Parker says that “one officer under whom Rosenberg served admitted to throwing away the poems he had been given: ‘they meant nothing to me.’”
Even Rosenberg’s grave is empty.
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By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:02:36 +0000

Daniel, if someone discovered some previously unknown material by someone as old and dead as John Clare, say, or Sir Thomas Wyatt, I would expect and appreciate attention from Poetry magazine.
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By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:19:07 +0000

Don,
I’m not arguing in any way that Spicer’s work is or is not worth reviewing – and maybe another arm of the Foundation could take on the project of evangelizing his poetry – just that perhaps this was not the best use of the space of Poetry Magazine in particular as a venue for contemporary poetry. Spicer is a poet of an era that is a half-century past, regardless of how ‘alive’ the work continues to be. It is not a portfolio of new translations, nor of work by a living or even recently deceased poet. Or, to put it another way: I find TS Eliot’s work to be ‘living’, and he also died in 1965 – no one, though, would make the case that he should be considered a contemporary poet.
Again, this isn’t about Spicer, just about the choice for Poetry Magazine.
Daniel
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:33:47 +0000

“the only reason Spicer is not alive now is because he died in 1965″
this sounds like a line from a Spicer poem, a wonderful tautology.
Spicer’s work is aliver now than ever before — it’s the perfect time to be celebrating it. Does anyone else find it interesting that so many of the best poets whose work is obviously influenced by Spicer are young women? Catherine Wagner & Lisa Jarnot spring immediately to mind, but others would spring too if I had more time. . . .
I have now officially posted way too many times in one day.
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By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:14:40 +0000

Dan, the only reason Spicer is not alive now is because he died in 1965. If he was 40 then, he would be 83 now, and there are living poets who are older than that.
And I do think of contemporary as anything from the last half-century or so.
But what do you have against dead poets anyway? Some of my favorite poets are dead ones.
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By: Jennifer S. Flescher

Jennifer S. Flescher — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:43:46 +0000

I don’t know — documentarians and historians have another take on privacy. We learn from history. We learn from details and the almost lost…
Aren’t we bigger than our egos? Our lives — the facts and stuff of them… the lesser poems. The Anead.
If someone REALLY wanted something burned, wouldn’t he do it himself? Maybe he did choose carefully!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:18:10 +0000

Daniel, we’ll be featuring the work of a contemporary poet in a portfolio of similar length in an upcoming issue, so please stay tuned; and indeed, we very much hope to do more of this.
But there’s contemporary in terms of who’s living, and contemporary in terms of whose work is living. Spicer’s work and reputation are arguably alive and well today – perhaps the editor of his forthcoming collected poems, poet Peter Gizzi, and others, too, will chime in about that. We felt the discovery of this unpublished work to be of interest to our present-day readers, but not all will agree – Harriet fans will recall Bill Knott’s recent response to the Spicer section!
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By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:02:05 +0000

I was sort of disappointed that the leading contemporary poetry journal in America spent so much space on a dead 1960s-era poet. There have to be equally worthy living, contemporary poets whose work could be featured at such length.
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By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:11:11 +0000

Lest we forget Helen Vendler’s venomous complaint in The New Republic when Alice Quinn’s Elizabeth Bishop book, Edgar Alan Poe and the Jukebox, came out. My guess is that, now that we are of the DVD-extra generation, these issues and aspects of privacy are going to be on increasing concern.
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