Comments on: Clear Cutting

By: Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:18:09 +0000

Hi Pierre,
I think Hass meant “political politics,” which I had also assumed to be the reason for the absence of all the post-WWII Polish poets, nearly all of whom were introduced into English by Milosz. With his Catholicism and his disdain for the American left, Milosz probably annoyed many people. Consider the papal tone of these famous lines:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations and people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
I gave my Volume I to a young Vietnamese poet, Phan Ba Tho, and have not bought a replacement copy. That’s why I forgot that Anatol Stern was included. And since the Eliot who wrote “The Waste Land” must be counted among the most “innovative & experimental poets” of the twentieth century, the exclusion of that longish poem I attribute to the fact that it’s already available in so many other anthologies. (There is a discussion of it in Poems for the Millenium.)

By: Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:07:31 +0000

Linh,
Surprised by Robert Haas’s asserttion that there are no Polish poets in Jerry Rothenberg’s and my Poems for the Millennium because of a supposed “political antipathy” by one of the editors, namely Jerry. Does he mean “political politics” or “literary politics’? In any case this is not so. There is in fact, one Polish poet in the anthology (Volume One, pp 251-260), namely Anatol Stern. His presence should point you toward why there are no others: our aim was to present not just “great” or “excellent” poets (note that Elliot, Auden, etc. are also not included— which Haas did indeed note), but to present what we think of as innovative & experimental poets, and it was our shared judgment that in relation to the well-known Polish post-WWII writers (Czeslaw Milosz & others) this was not the case.
Pierre

By: Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:23:00 +0000

Yo Kent,
I was just down the street at Pizza Hut, having an intimate moment with my indifferent lasagna, when a photograph of Jorie Graham walked in, then an enjambed Yusef Komunyakaa.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:45:40 +0000

Linh,
I met Robert Hass once, in Providence. This was the day after my good friend Kasey Silem Mohammad and I had given a reading together there. After that reading, Kasey and I and Mike Magee and Michael Gizzi and I think Ben Lerner and a bunch of other people had gone to a hip Cuban restaurant, and we all sat at a long table under a big picture of Che Guevara. Kasey was sitting across from me. We were making small talk about whatever, and I leaned over and whispered, Kasey, you have some sauce on your chin. He smiled and wiped it off with a napkin, and somehow this intimate moment brought us closer together. Three months later he banned me from his blog.
Anyway, as I was saying, I met Robert Hass the next day after a talk he gave at Brown, and C.D. Wright introduced us, and we kind of shuffled our feet for a few seconds, and he smiled and said, So what are you working on now, Kent? Well, I said, I’m working on the second Saenz book…. He looked at me quizzically, and said, Aha, and then turned to someone else and began talking to them, and by and by he left with Forrest Gander, who was driving him to airport. About an hour later, I met Forrest at a cafe, and he said, You know, I have a funny story to tell you. What? I said, I NEED a funny story. Well, said, Forrest, I was driving Robert to the airport, and he said that he asked you what you were working on, and you replied, “I’m working on the second Science book,” and that he thought that seemed an odd thing to say. Ha ha ha, I laughed, you’ve got to be kidding me.
And then Keith Waldrop walked in, with his incredible white beard, which is like a long icicle covered in snow.
Kent