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Hot on the heels of Geoffrey Hill’s third Professor of Poetry lecture this past Tuesday, the Albion Beatnik Bookshop hosted the poets Peter Gizzi and Ian Pindar for a late-evening reading that proved to be one of the most exciting Oxford poetry events of the year.

The poets each read for about 20 minutes and then answered questions from the capacity audience that had gathered at the cozy, elegant shop.

Pindar, an editor, James Joyce biographer, and regular contributor to The Guardian and TLS, read first from his debut collection of poems, Emporium (to be published by Carcanet later this month). Emerging from the broad French Symbolist and Surrealist traditions, via T.S. Eliot, and with more than a touch of NY School glitter and wide allusiveness, Pindar’s learned, witty, and admirably controlled poems tend to follow an attractively quirky logic not often seen in contemporary British poetry. At their best, they expose the dark underside of the Metaphors We Live By:

ASHES

are bodies in disguise
mixing sighs and
tears in a lost garden.

An air of importance
permeates these
cosmonauts of
compost,

which the pomo of sky and stars
ignores.

Foolish men
inhabit their bodies like
metaphors.

Peter Gizzi, who came on next, is the author of four books of poems, most recently Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) and The Outernationale (2007), books which rank among the most important and innovative volumes of American poetry of the past decade. He is also the prolific editor of numerous projects including the literary journal o•blék (1987-1993), the Exact Change Yearbook: 1995 (an indispensable collection of international experimental writing), and the lectures and collected poems of Jack Spicer. He teaches at The University of Massachusettes, Amherst, and since January has held the position of Poet-in-Residence at Cambridge.

Though midway through his reading a jazz band struck up across the street at The Big Bang—threatening to lend an air of a Beat “happening” to the proceedings—Gizzi gave a passionate and focused reading from his latest manuscript, Threshold Songs (the first he has ever given):

EDGAR POE

Winter’s the thing.
A place to lay one’s head.
To sleep at last

to sleep. Blue on flesh
in snow light,
iced boughs overhead.

This is a poem about breath,
brick, a piece of ink
in the distance.

Winter’s the thing
I miss. The font is still.
A fanfare of stone air.

How fortunate to have seen these poets—so different, yet so strangely complementary—read from their work in the finest bookshop in Oxford.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St. John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Thomas Graham & Arabella Currie, eds.
Halfcircle
£2 (Issue 1); £3 (Issue 2)

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The Oxford-based poetry journal Halfcircle celebrated the launch of its second issue Sunday evening at Albion Beatnik Bookshop. Founded last year and edited by Oxford students Thomas Graham and Arabella Currie, Halfcircle aims to bridge the gap between the dominant “experimental” and “mainstream” tendencies in contemporary British poetry—tendencies characterised by the editors in a recent statement as “the British Poetry Revival, Movement poets, and their respective sons and daughters.”

Within each of these slim pamphlets readers will find 20 pages of work from writers on both sides of the divide, staple-bound and featuring letter-pressed covers produced at the Bodleian bibliography room, with an off-white A5 interior.

The first issue inclines more toward the experimental camp. Some of it sounds a lot like secondhand Cambridge School, though this is balanced out in a poised sequence by Anselm Hollo, a slangy bagatelle by Louis Eastwood, and a translation of Sappho’s “Fragment 13” by Nakul Krishna. The excerpts from Gerry Loose’s “Fault Line” alone are worth the price of admission:

XXIX

some of us still live
in the woods
by candlelight
sewing new lines
drinking with hoolets
it will end soon
a knitted glove
no hand

commentary:

then
name this one the nucleus
brighter than fission
lighting the woods
bitter sorrel
blood cleanser

Things really begin to get interesting, however, in the second issue. The editors should win an award for managing to publish Don Paterson and Drew Milne on facing pages. As if mocking the rhyming Paterson piece, Milne’s selection, written in four-line stanza-blocks, sequesters two words to its margin in alternating lines, as if to say “these are the rhyme words.” But they don’t rhyme:

nick tones show for where read were for
cold read pale for wretched do wreathed    toes
and here are the further designs ready
for after party ampersands in dark blue      slid

The issue opens with an elegant two-part reverie on “Essex Skies” by Peter Riley. Other highlights include work by Steve McCaffery, Peter McDonald, two fine minimalist pieces by Alexander Booth, and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s “America”, a witty meditation on the unlikely pair Helen Keller and Phineas Gage.

Copies of the journal are now available at Blackwell’s, Albion Beatnik Bookshop, and by order online from the Halfcircle website. It will be interesting to see what Halfcircle come up with next. If they follow up on what they have already achieved, it certainly won’t disappoint.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St. John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Alexandra Harris
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination
from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Thames and Hudson, 2010
320 Pages
£19.95
ISBN 978-0500251713

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A glance at the state of newly emergent humanities criticism in the early 2010s does not inspire confidence. An emphasis on professionalism, careerism, and micro-specialisation on esoteric topics has given rise to a sterile, bureaucratic climate in which much is published and sold, but little is read or applied (and even less is actually discussed). Quantity triumphs easily over quality. Meanwhile, the decline of both humane literary criticism and cultural theory—those onetime bitter enemies—as living intellectual traditions has created a flat, featureless critical topography. Successful academics in the 21st century have no particular allegiances to identifiable schools of opinion; as vulnerable short-term-contract professionals, they cannot afford to. Competitive business-style networking stands in for academic community; hyper-diligence replaces meaningful thought. Lifestyle, not learning, drives an entire generation of scholars.

Where does Romantic Moderns—the first full-length study by the young academic Alexandra Harris—fit into this picture? For the Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead, Harris’s study of 1930s and ‘40s art provides a new and affirmative answer to critics of academia’s worth and utility. “Alexandra Harris’s groundbreaking book”, Armitstead commented at the tail-end of last year, “is a reminder of how important higher education is to literature, and to culture as a whole”. Against the backdrop of an epochal crisis in British university education, in which some much-needed soul-searching about the social function of arts research is taking place, Armitstead appeared to suggest that Romantic Moderns might help us to recapture a sense of what academia is for.

Is Armitstead right? Does Harris’s book suggest that the current crop of young scholars might have it in them to provide a new justification for cultural criticism in these troubled times? Unfortunately, the answer of these reviewers must be a resounding “no”. If Romantic Moderns is representative of higher education at the start of the 2010s, then frankly, we should all be seriously worried. This is a muddled, exacerbating book that demonstrates just how difficult defending academia will be in the years to come.

Romantic Moderns is founded on a revisionary premise. “If we think of the canonical work of the 1930s”, Harris states in her prologue, we think of it as the “age of Auden”:

… its literary culture was one of socialist politics, borderlands, ports and industrial ruins. There was also, though, a culture fascinated by the decline of aristocracy and the symbolism of the country estate, interested in the future of village churches, and drawn to the Romantic tradition in the arts.

Against the grain of a critical orthodoxy that has apparently been conjured out of thin air (who is the “we” that thinks in this reductive way?), Harris sets out to provide a polemical corrective. We should not only think of the ‘30s and ‘40s as a modernist epoch of iconoclasm, experimentation, and social activism. In fact, nostalgia and a love of things past played a significant role too:

Writers and painters were drawn to the crowded, detailed, old-fashioned and whimsical, gathering souvenirs from an old country that might not survive…There is a story to be told about this passionate, exuberant return to tradition.

For Claire Armitstead, this narrative of a return to tradition may be groundbreaking, but anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the writing and art of the early 20th century is unlikely to share her and Harris’s belief that something new is being stated here. In fact, modernism, and especially the canonical “high modernism” of the late 1910s and 1920s, has frequently been seen as an epitome of past-worshiping traditionalism. Reeling off obvious examples like Picasso’s neo-primitivism, or Le Corbusier’s rapturous treatment of Notre-Dame de Paris in Towards a New Architecture (1927), or Proust’s search for lost time, or Joyce’s use of Homeric myth in Ulysses (1922) should not be necessary to show that even at its most daring and innovative, modernism was always visibly obsessed with the past. As such, the notion of a later return to tradition in the ‘30s is a puzzling one. Perhaps the extreme wing of futurism is in Harris’s mind when she states of the modernism against which she sets her “Romantic” thesis that its “form of liberty involved the abolition of roots”. One would be interested to know what she makes of Ezra Pound’s “Canto I”, which initiates one of the most influential works of literary modernism with a poetic reworking of Odysseus’s journey into the underworld to interrogate the dead. For Pound, as for many of his artistic coevals, history and roots were indispensible parts of the modernist project.

But then Pound does not get a mention in Romantic Moderns. Perhaps his American nationality disqualified him from inclusion in this astonishingly insular, Anglocentric study, yet the English and British omissions are similarly baffling. What of Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, or David Jones, none of whom are explicitly mentioned even once? For many of us, these are among the names that come to mind when one mentions England and modern literature in the interwar years. Critical surveys must be selective: they cannot be comprehensive about absolutely everything, and this one in particular is a boldly multidisciplinary project. But the elision of a figure like the writer-painter Lewis, outside a very cursory reference to vorticism, in a study purporting to reassess the literature and art of this period is bewildering. What is being expunged from the records here, and what is it being replaced with? When a book about the 1930s elides the international modernism of Pound, Lewis, and Ford, but finds time for Cecil Beaton and a multi-page discussion of Lark Rise to Candleford, you begin to wonder what on earth is going on.

This is not to insist on rehashing the same old modernist narratives that have more or less been in circulation since the 50s. New perspectives, revivals, and critical reevaluations are always welcome and necessary. But if most of the major players of that narrative have been escorted off stage, we cannot help asking: who has taken their place? A lengthy passage underscoring the pastoral emphasis of interwar art (another polemical theme) might stand as a dramatis personae for Romantic Moderns:

If a Domesday Book had been compiled in the late 1930s, recording the inhabitants of villages and outlying farms, it would include most of the major figures of English art and letters: the Woolfs in Rodmell, the Pipers at Fawley Bottom Farmhouse, the Betjemans under the White Horse at Uffington, Gerald Lord Berners in nearby Faringdon, E.M. Forster in Abinger, Stanley Spencer in Cookham, Vita Sackville-West in Kent, Edith Olivier in Wilton, Cecil Beaton at Ashcombe, Evelyn Waugh at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire, Edward Bawden in Great Bardfield, Eric and Tirzah Ravilious in nearby Castle Hedingham … It seems counter-intuitive to describe English villages as centres for the avant-garde … but [they] certainly cannot be left out of the account.

If a Domesday-style census were indeed imaginable after an Industrial Revolution which Harris at times appears to be pretending never happened, then of course it would have to include “most of the major figures of English art and letters”; in fact, it would have to include all of them, city-dwellers and residents of northern England included. But Harris uses the Domesday analogy not for its connotations of exhaustive inclusiveness, but because it evokes a very specific set of values embodied by a very specific social group. Harris’s 1930s “avant-garde” flies in the face of all known definitions of the term to designate a collection of fashionable dilettantes and pseudo-aristocrats living out fairytale commuters’ existences, a class of people we have already heard described as “old-fashioned and whimsical”, intent on “gathering souvenirs from an old country that might not survive”.

Figures like Waugh, Betjeman, and Beaton have always, quite rightly, been viewed as romantic reactionaries with a patrician disdain for modernism. What are they doing here in a book founded on the notion that the art of the period was both romantic and modern? Aren’t many of these examples merely romantic, late-imperial nostalgists, as people have always assumed? In a year of resurgent Toryism and revived popularity for the British monarchy, this attempt to paint these notoriously unsubtle ancien régime sympathizers as the forgotten heroes of English letters is worryingly apt.

The problem with Harris’s book is not its documentary scope; in fact, it’s a handy, if dizzying, encyclopedia of interwar British art and culture, handsomely produced and filled with beautiful colour plates. The problem is its strong whiff of revisionism, its eagerness to stage an intervention in a critical discourse of modernism long biased against the kind of easy traditionalism which the book champions. It is a profoundly odd intervention, not least because of its drastically flattened-out account of high modernism itself as an urbane, futurist, amnesiac phenomenon, bent on occluding the past and foisting pure forms and Spartan living on the public. The trouble begins with the first sentence of the jacket flap: “England has had a bad press from the Modernist disciples of a shiny, high-speed future.” From the start, then, modernism has been reduced to a composite caricature of Marinetti, Le Corbusier, and Mondrian (with perfunctory glances at Picasso and Stein). By contrast, the reactionary tendencies of so many interwar British artists and cultural luminaries appear bathed in the golden retrospective light of trendy contemporary localism. The jacket flap provides an eloquent résumé of this position:

In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive at that moment, and in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that ‘the modern’ need not be at war with the past…Through all their work runs a celebration of locality and often of the mischievous English climate. But most powerful of all is their fascination with finding—or imagining—possible homes.

In this model of British modernism, even T.S. Eliot will become a back-to-the-land acolyte. “In T.S. Eliot, we find the poet as farmer”, Harris states. Another memorably banal phrase resorts to scarcely intelligible upper-middle-class patois to describe the dichotomy at the heart of the book’s argument as “the question of straight lines versus twiddles”. But best of all: “Betjeman’s ‘year of facing both ways’ exemplified the divided allegiances of a whole Janus-faced decade, looking out on both curlicues and voids.”

Simply put, Romantic Moderns whitewashes the sense of modernist “crisis”, replacing it with a stubbornly pastoralist, naïve nationalism—instead of telling an alternate history of late modernism’s overlooked and misrepresented practitioners (which in any case would be welcome) it simply de-fangs the era’s more aggressive, volatile elements such as Eliot and Woolf by arrogating them into a canon presided over by Betjeman, Waugh, Piper, and the Sitwells. What does not sit well is the sense put forward that the more “experimental” modernists somehow got things wrong with their abstraction, radical disjuncture, and meddling with temporal continuity—or at least that contemporary commentators have gotten things wrong by focusing so much attention on these issues, to the detriment of the “romantic moderns”. What does not sit well is the sense that what was really needed of avant-garde art in the interwar period of political turmoil was a concerted, faintly moralistic national heritage movement.

This moralism comes through perhaps most strongly in the book’s insistence that we adopt a more generous, “elastic” approach to modernist studies. At the end of the first chapter, the author rounds off a discussion of John Piper by marveling at “an unusually elastic idea of modernity” emanating from his work. More contentiously, the author declares in the Afterword that

university courses on ‘Modernist Literature’ are now frequently elastic enough to include Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh, while recent critical writing on canonical modernists like Eliot and Woolf has turned our attention to their investment in ideas of national tradition and local culture.

Finally, the book concludes with John Piper’s 1937 observation that “the tradition, once more, has to stretch.” Again, here we have that unnerving and irritating whiff of revisionism, propounding a miraculously cohesive fantasy version of the ’30s and ’40s (the same period, let us not forget, that Djuna Barnes published Nightwood under Eliot’s editorial care, Auden moved to America, Samuel Beckett came on the scene, and Pound made his infamous Rome radio broadcasts).

Last year, the publication of two books—Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened To Modernism? and Tom McCarthy’s novel C—breathed new life into UK discussions of “experimental” modernism. For better or worse, Josipovici articulated a forceful, if at times ornery, vision of modernism as a long-unfolding tendency defined as “the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities.” The book was outspokenly critical of the contemporary British novel after the lights of McEwan, Amis, and co. and of the cultural climate which exalts it. In the final chapter, Josipovici sums it all up:

Modernism has its friends over here [in England] but they are what the art historian T.J. Clark has called ‘false friends’, that is, those who defend a version of Modernism that is at once crude and superficial and therefore make it even more difficult to grasp what it truly is.

It is true that a serious discussion needs to take place about where and how academia is talking to the public. But what is equally certain is that this conversation must not take place in the crude, lifestyle-oriented terms delineated in the false friend that is Romantic Moderns. This is a book that succeeds in taming one of the most energetic and ideologically parlous periods in the history of European art so that it acquires the aspect of a quaint bourgeois era full of country walks, antiquarianism, gardening, and stately home restoration projects. This vision of what cultural criticism should be is bound to appeal to a certain kind of readership, but this says more about a much deeper malaise in British culture than it does about modernism itself.

Alex Niven and Stephen Ross are reading for DPhils in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. They are senior editors at the Oxonian Review.

Graham Foust
A Mouth in California
Flood Editions, 2009
96 Pages
£10.36
ISBN 978-0981952017

There’s an interesting study waiting to be written on the abuse of catchphrases and commonplaces in contemporary poetry; so many poets have wrung great lines out of them. In the following passage from J.H. Prynne’s early masterpiece, “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self,” for instance, we find the spirit of self-help advice torqued into something cuttingly beautiful:

We give the name of
our selves to our needs.
We want what we are.

Here, we encounter a poetic logic not dissimilar from that which governs many of the best poems in Graham Foust’s (b. 1970) fourth collection, A Mouth in California. It is a logic that loves to resolve itself into canny, warped aphorisms about the tragicomedy of human desire. And in Foust’s hands, it’s also apt to resolve itself into something bleak, funny, curt, and self-effacing (the back cover of A Mouth in California refers to Foust’s “unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls”, his “ballet of falling down”). In his “Poem with Rules and Laws”, one of a dozen poems titled “Poem with [Something],” he conducts some cliché-torquing of his own:

You don’t lust
for what you
want. You lust
for what you
can get.

“We want what we are.” “You lust for what you can get.” We want these to say “you can’t always get what you want”, but we can’t always get what we want, can we? In “Poem with Television”, Foust asks:

What part of
“What part of no
don’t you understand?”
don’t you understand…

Behind this kind of writing lies the understanding—so important for writers over the past century—that everyday speech, set slightly out of joint or context, can deliver both personal and collective revelation. Emily Dickinson called this telling the truth but telling it slant. Prynne knew it in the late 60s, and Graham Foust knows it today.

Yet Foust is no prophet or poet-philosopher, brilliant craftsman or bard. “Wordsmith” might be closer to the mark, though it’s a touch unfair. His poems hardly ever exceed two pages (not a judgment, just a fact) and have titles like “Poem with Premature Ejaculation” and “Perhaps I Have Not Mentioned That I Am Dismantling a House”. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, yet he’s a seriously good poet. Writers and former English majors will revel in their ability to tease out his references to the likes of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Pierre Reverdy, Jack Spicer, Johnny Knoxville, O.J. Simpson, and “Home on the Range”. And best of all, Foust is subtle:

What Woke Me

Not the minor
quake but

the dissonant
taste

of a paint
chip.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is the executive editor at the Oxonian Review.

John Ashbery
Planisphere
Carcanet, 2009
160 Pages
£12.95
ISBN 978-1847770899

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The planisphere is a flat, circular star chart used to calculate the position of the stars and constellations. It is also the title of John Ashbery’s most recent collection of poems, his 24th overall and his 12thsince 1991. Reserving judgment, for the moment, on the poems themselves (always a good idea with Ashbery), one can safely say that Planisphere is his most exotic book title in years—possibly his best since Hotel Lautréamont (1992).

Yet, as readers have long known, Ashbery’s poem and book titles are about as trustworthy as a snake-oil salesman: you pay for one thing, you usually get another. This certainly obtains with Planisphere, a collection of poems which, aside from its frequent inducement of starry-eyed bafflement, has almost nothing to do with star charts or outer space. This sort of misdirection is, of course, one of the hallmarks of the “Ashbery experience.” “So call it untitled”, Ashbery writes in a poem titled “Zero Percentage”:

………..………..but
don’t imagine you’ll be let off the hook:
The title will find it as surely
as a heat-seeking missile locks on
an asteroid. Down below, armies
and oceans of taxis will squawk unfeelingly.
The title always wins.

Here, a “planispherical” theme seems to be peeking through: we are in outer space; the poem is an asteroid; the title is a heat-seeking missile; the poet is…the space ship? God? Soon enough, these hermeneutic parlor games lose steam. Our interpretive designs on Ashbery always prove futile. His elusively non-allusive titles always win.

And yet, maybe there is a grand planispherical theme to be teased out here after all. For Ashbery is like a kind of spaceship, or, even better, like Hal 9000, the evil computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reading his last few decades’ work, one has the disquieting sensation of communicating with a chatty, superhuman intelligence stocked with endless stores of information, taking us on a possibly malign journey through space and time. Of course, we all remember what happens to Hal at the end of the movie: Dave frantically pulls him apart, circuit board by circuit board, as Hal inanely croons “Daisy Bell”. And so readers and critics have delighted in attempting something similar with Ashbery, whom they have long suspected of linguistic treachery.

Ultimately, this strained analogy might seem like a roundabout way of proposing that Ashbery has entered a period of decline. But in fact, to speak of Ashbery’s “decline” almost certainly overstates the matter; indeed, all signs point to the opposite of a decline, at least in productivity. He continues to win awards and has published more than half his books since turning 60. It would be far more accurate to say that over the past 20 years he has settled into a recognizable late style, characterized—with the exceptions of the book-length Flow Chart (1991) and Girls on the Run (1999)—by rapt, bathetic, funny, distracted, thinly charged lyrics glued together with a kind of user-friendly surrealist logic. In this sense, the late style differs from the earlier and middle styles only in its thin charge.

This is not to dismiss Planisphere—or the last two decades’ worth of writing—but simply to observe that Ashbery has found a reliable way in old age of continuing to do, in perhaps attenuated form, what he does best: to dramatize the way the mind moves among ideas without bothering with the ideas themselves.  Accounts of Ashbery’s late work, as of Bob Dylan’s “Never-Ending Tour”, might be mixed, but we are no less grateful that these song-and-dance men are still out performing.

And in any event, Ashbery’s signature Cheshire-cat wistfulness continues to glimmer behind everything he writes. The hardest passages to digest in Planisphere are not those that mislead us but those that seem to tell the truth. One would prefer not to take Ashbery at his word when he tells us, “This is how my days,/ my nights are spent, in a crowded vacuum / overlooking last year’s sinkhole” (“Spooks Run Wild”), or when, commenting on old age, or fame, or anything else, he writes, “It had meant to be sublime, but hell was / what it more specifically resembled” (“Planisphere”).

As with all of Ashbery’s previous collections, one inevitably reads Planisphere opportunistically, alert to those not infrequent moments that shimmer with the prospect of a revelation. “That’s the whole point, as I understand it”, he writes in “Boundary Issues”:

Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency,
like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it,
causing its eventual collapse. We could all see that
from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode
from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered.
It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did,
poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one
correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.

Or consider the following passage from “Uptick”:

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

At this point, it would be tempting just to quote the dozen or so other passages in Planisphere that partake of a similar lyric splendor and end on a high note. But that would be to give a laughably unbalanced impression of this volume’s contents, and of Ashbery himself. Indeed, Planisphere is a grab-bag of classic Ashberyan tricks, trademarks, and gimmicks: there are a few collages, a poem with double-columned stanzas (not distinct from each other, however, as in his remarkable “Litany”), proliferating indefinite pronouns, throwaway titles (“Um”, “For Fuck’s Sake”, “The Seventh Chihuahua”), a winsomely pedantic resume of a 1930s film about the Tower of London starring Boris Karloff, and, of course, distortions of the English poetic tradition (“So we’ll go no more a-teething”, he writes in “Um”, infantilizing Lord Byron’s paean to lost youth, “So we’ll go no more a-roving”). Like his 1997 volume Can You Hear, Bird, the poems in Planisphere appear in alphabetical order.

Rather than try to end on an artificially high note, then, let us end on a note of semi-detached realism. Here are the final lines of “Semi-Detached”, a condensed account of what it often feels like to read Ashbery:

You’ll never be more agitated than you are now,
at this insurpassable moment. I, on the other hand
am cool for the time being. Such is my creed.

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Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is the editor-in-chief at the Oxonian Review.

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Albion Beatnik

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This past week, members of the Oxonian Review editorial staff visited the Albion Beatnik Bookstore on Walton Street. We had a chance to chat with Albion’s owner, Dennis Harrison, and to take some photos of his elegant, whimsical shop. Albion opened in 2008 and features, in Dennis’s words, “interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.”

Indeed, Albion boasts world-class collections of both “Beat” literature and jazz-related writing, and hits most other 20th-century avant-garde and counter-cultural high points along the way. With its extensive offering of modern British, American, and European poetry and fiction and its well selected (and cheap!) secondhand section, Albion represents a bold and refreshing gesture of indie vitality in a city whose independent book and music store scene has barely a pulse.

Dennis spoke with us for about 45 minutes, while we all sipped coffee and listened to Miles Davis. The wood-floors, book-lined shelves, and jazzy atmosphere made Albion a lovely place to spend an afternoon. The following is a brief excerpt from our conversation:

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OR: How did you choose the name Albion Beatnik?

DH: Albion is an old word for England, and beatnik is an American slang word introduced by Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s (he claimed from the word “beatific”). I just liked it, really. Though, “beatnik” on the sign outside probably looks worse to a passersby than “jazz” would!

OR: It looks like you order a lot of your books from American publishers. I noticed, for instance, that you carry the American editions of Kurt Vonnegut…

DH: I try more and more to order books from the US because they’re so much nicer, and different. The Vonneguts, for instance, have such wonderful covers, and I don’t understand why a book shouldn’t be pleasant to look at as well as to read. And quite often they’re on acid-free paper, so they’re going to last longer.

OR: Do you see the bookshop as providing a cultural service to Oxford?

DH: Well, that’s what I’d like to do. But as I’ve said, this shop is also self-indulgent. It’s not about me being a magnanimous and tremendously good fellow; it’s about doing more than just having a bookshop. That’s why I enjoy being a bookseller in my other shop [Wendover Bookshop], where I put on jazz concerts in the shop and in the local church. People love it, and that’s great, you know. It’s better than watching TV.

OR: You opened Albion in Christmas 2008. How long have you had your other bookshop?

DH: About 21 years.

OR: And how would you categorize Albion?

DH: Well, I’m not going to say it’s a niche bookshop, but it’s not a general bookshop either. You wouldn’t come in here and buy a gardening book. I don’t sell children’s books. Albion focuses primarily on interesting fiction of the 20th century, with an emphasis on alternative culture and the beatnik life—travel, poetry, popular music, and jazz.

OR: So you aren’t just trying to sell the latest bestsellers. I see, for instance, that there’s a stack of House of Leaves and Infinite Jest on the shelf right there…

DH: Yeah, because they’re more interesting. I mean, I’m not sure I’d personally want to read House of Leaves, but…!

(Laughter.)

OR: And finally, one last question: do you have a favourite author?

DH: Joseph Conrad.

OR: Thank you.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Stephen is the editor in chief at the Oxonian Review.

Sarah Leyla Puello is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sarah is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. Akshat is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

John N. Serio
Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
Borzoi, 2009
352 Pages
£18.21
ISBN 978-0307280471

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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who worked most of his adult life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, wrote some of the most memorable and influential poems of the 20th century. His great subject was the “imagination”—the self, the muse, poetry itself—and its reality-making encounters with the world. In “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”, he writes, “We say God and the imagination are one. . ./ How high that highest candle lights the dark”. And in one of his most famous poems, “The Snow Man”, he describes “the listener, who listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.

Among American modernist poets, Stevens was the gaudiest and most playful. Those who have never read a line of his poetry probably still know that “the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream”. With the release of the Selected Poems, readers will once again find their way to these difficult and rewarding poems.

That said, the Selected Poems does not displace or fill in the gaps of earlier volumes of Stevens’s poetry—namely, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems, the large selections of The Palm at the End of the Mind and Opus Posthumous, and most recently, the magisterial, 1,032 page Library of America Collected Poetry and Prose. Nor does this slim hardback offer an attractive, handy alternative to these imposing volumes, with its toothpaste-green and black colouring and oversize sidelong cover photograph of Stevens (which almost certainly would have made the poet uncomfortable). Selected editions of the American poets Frank O’Hara and James Merrill have also appeared in this unfortunate format within the last year, proving that tragic events always come in threes.

Inside its toothpaste cover, the Selected continues to disappoint. It offers nothing by way of a critical apparatus or even notes to the poems (aside from the requisite chronology of Stevens’s life and list of suggested readings). Of course, these are not requirements for a selected poems collection, though they might have enticed Stevens veterans eager for fresh insights into his work and certainly would have been appreciated by novice readers. While editor John Serio should be commended for including all of Stevens’s major long poems, and for hitting many other highlights along the way, one can’t help wondering why this volume was made in the first place.

Ultimately, readers are better off sticking with the Library of America volume or the paperback Collected Poems, available in just about every major bookstore in the Western world. In a late poem, Stevens refers to the Collected as “the planet on the table”. It’s a planet well worth exploring in its entirety.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Heather McHugh
Upgraded to Serious
Copper Canyon, 2009
120 Pages
£13.35
ISBN 978-1556593062

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Two quotations form the epigraphs to Upgraded to Serious, Heather McHugh’s latest poetry collection. By turns pithy and sonically exhilarating, they offer an excellent introduction to McHugh’s own poetry. The first, overhead in conversation, reads:

I use white-black life gain and self-burn, green-black discard rush, and blue-green buildup creature crush.

The second is taken from an obscure 18th-century dialogue by Matthew Prior:

I love Method, extremely.

If this 300-year-old snippet sounds completely modern, this is precisely McHugh’s intention. Such radical re-contextualization is her trademark, her secret weapon, her Method.

McHugh’s poetry generates its unusual energy by dislocating, fracturing, and resetting words and phrases in new and startling contexts. As she explains in a recent essay, “My own energies tend toward centrifugal spray rather than tidy consolation”. Her poems—sutured, scattershot—turn on ingenious punning and wordplay. They are studded with cunningly rearranged bits of language, from everyday bromides and sound bytes to echoes of ancient Greek poetry. As such, McHugh’s work emerges from the various 20th-century traditions in fragmentary poetics and invites comparison with the condensed, ironized colloquialism of her contemporary, Rae Armantrout.

But unlike collage or otherwise disjunctive verse, McHugh’s poems move as fluent wholes, thanks in part to her artful use of rhyme, rhythm, and portmanteaux. If much ancient poetry has become fragmentary over time, and much modern poetry begins as fragments, Heather McHugh’s poetry blurs the line between fragments and wholes, crafting one from the other. She delights both in dilating linguistic fragments into astonishing new wholes and in exposing and excavating language’s invisible fault-lines. “All poetry is fragment”, she writes in a recent essay, “it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn”.

McHugh’s preoccupations with fragment and wordplay continue to prevail in Upgraded to Serious, which confirms her status as one of the most exciting American poets writing today. Upgraded follows closely on the announcement that McHugh is one of this year’s recipients of a MacArthur Fellowship, a five-year, $500,000 grant. In addition to winning the so-called “genius grant”, she has also been a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize (2004) and the National Book Award (1995), and in 2001 was awarded the inaugural Griffin International Poetry Prize for her translations of the German poet Paul Celan. Born in 1948, she has been affiliated with various artists’ colonies, colleges, and universities, most recently the University of Washington and Warren Wilson College.

While at first glance her latest venture appears preoccupied with morbid themes (the cover features a disembodied mummy head and the back cover shows McHugh standing impishly beside a spray-painted skeleton), Upgraded proves to be anything but a self-regarding slog through McHugh’s thoughts on death and life. Rather, her poems about these subjects, and many others, offer a refreshing return to—and reinvention of—staple poetic devices like wit and metaphysical speculation. At their best, they call to mind some of the finest work of poets as disparate as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

Take, for instance, “Webcam the World”, a contemporary riff on Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Aleph”, a short story in which a character sees everything happening everywhere from every perspective, all at once. McHugh’s poem—a mélange of slang and science jargon, colloquialisms, and poeticisms—aims for a similar inclusivity. Written for the age of YouTube, it bubbles with apocalyptic pathos and bathos:

Get all of it. Set up the shots
at every angle; run them online
24-7. Run the beautiful stuff (like
scenery and greenery and style)
and get the ugliness (like cruelty
and quackery and rue). There’s nothing
unastonishing—but get that, too. We have

to save it all, now that we can, and while.
Do close-ups with electron microscopes
and vaster pans with planetcams.
It may be getting close
to our last chance —
how many

millipedes or elephants are left?

The manic film director here is the poet herself, overwhelmed by the god-like task of cataloguing, describing, and laying claim to as much of the world as possible before both she and it disappear. Yet for McHugh, it’s never really the end of the world; later in the poem, she echoes God’s first words of Creation: “Let / mileage be footage, let years be light”. Despite its irreverent flair, “Webcam the World” belongs within the tradition of what might be called “divine listing” poems, from the Latin hymn “Benedicite, Omnia Opera Domini” to Section V of Whitman’s Song of Myself and Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”.

McHugh’s affinities to a poet like Hopkins and to his contemporary, Emily Dickinson, are worth further mention, as such diverse parallels are rarely combined in contemporary poets. There is, on the one hand, her quicksilver instinct for rhyme, meter, and Hopkinsian “sprung rhythm”; on the other, there’s her Dickinsonian knack for condensation and preternatural perceptiveness. Her poem “Far Niente”, a delightful burst of philosophical reverie, comes at the reader like hip-hop lyrics:

Nothing is beyond our ken
and Everything is spurious.
Anything is close at hand
but we want Something—fast

and furious. Just to the stone men
near the end of the fever
takes the most curious
almost forever. Nothing is farther

again: Nothing is nearer
the truth. No one woke from the first—
we were wholly immersed —
then we burst into Youth.

“Far niente” or “dolce far niente” means “sweet idleness” in Italian, though this poem is anything but sweet and idle. The title phrase serves mostly as an aural spur to McHugh, inspiring the partly homophonic phrase “nothing is farther”. The fast and furious rhymes and counterpointing abstractions—”Nothing-Everything-Anything-Something”—are an irresistible (“ear-resistible”, McHugh might say) reprieve from so much modern poetry that deliberately  seems to ignore the ear and the intellect.

Then there is McHugh in her aphoristic Dickinson-mode, as in “The Microscope”:

Through petri dishes’ rings
life is transmogrified. When we
look into things, we see

there’s space inside.

Or at her most inspired, in the concluding lines of “The River Overflows the Rift”:

………..The word

must move: the minute does.
Its starred expanses dazzle
humankind (wherever there’s a mind
for wonderment). In time

the glimmers of the uncontained
outcourse even a lover’s frozen frown,
the silver wave revives the mower. Glowers
by glow are overcome, flowers by flow.

Though just shy of making clear sense, these lines demonstrate the way in which McHugh’s best writing pivots emotional content on the sounds and unforeseen metamorphoses of words. McHugh touches on this pivoting—or “hinging”—in the introduction to her 1994 selected poems, Hinge and Sign:

The sign moves by virtue of the hidden hinge; the poem signs, sighs, sings of meaning made moving. . . .A poem contains meaning only the way a body contains life: moving, it IS it.

Reading McHugh’s work, we must recognize the many translingual puns, fanciful etymologies, and echoes of sound not as unqualified distortions of language but as deliberate and legitimate poetic choices. No linguistic fragment or emotional register is too subtle or commonplace for the movement—the glow and flow—of her imagination.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Cole Swensen and David St. John
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
Norton, 2009
560 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0393333756

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Nearly 60 years ago, Randall Jarrell observed the onset of a bizarre phenomenon in American letters: the rise of the poetry anthology. In the “verse chronicle” of his 1953 collection of critical essays, Poetry and the Age, he presents this development as a kind of dopey Cinderella story:

This is so much the age of anthologies that it is surprising that poets still waste their time on books of verse, instead of writing anthologies in the first place. If you are about to print a book of poems, don’t: make up a few names and biographical sketches with which to punctuate your manuscript, change its title to Poems of Democracy, and you will find yourself transformed from an old pumpkin, always in the red, to a shiny black new coach.

In spite of Jarrell’s mocking directive, a flurry of anthologies appeared in the late 1950s and early 60s, all vying in their own way to be the most influential showpiece of the new American poetry. The subsequent “anthology wars” divided the lines between what Robert Lowell dubbed “cooked and uncooked poetry”—the elegant, “traditional”, formalist work of poets like Philip Larkin, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill and the slangy, “experimental”, free verse poetry of then-marginalized writers like Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Frank O’Hara.

The mainstays of these opposing camps were two anthologies: the (cooked) New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and the (uncooked) New American Poetry 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. Meanwhile, other “new” anthologies began appearing like clockwork, and the battle continued to rage well into the 90s.

For better or worse, Cole Swensen and David St. John have cast American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry as the final battleground in the anthology war. They do so by arguing that the battle was fought out years ago, as signaled by the emergence of “hybrid poetry” over the last two decades. Hybrid writings, according to Swensen and St. John, bridge and blur the distinctions between “cooked and uncooked” poetry, cherry-picking from both and thereby defying easy classification.

The resulting species of poem is not beholden to categories like formal or free verse, traditional or experimental, but instead accommodates an infinite degree of cross-breeding among forms (free verse with occasional rhymes, sonnets that don’t rhyme, etc.). As Swensen notes in her excellent introduction, hybrid poetry is not an entirely new formulation but roughly corresponds to other critical rubrics such as Ron Silliman’s notion of “third-wave poetics”, the “post-avant”, and Stephen Burt’s “elliptical” poetry.

Swensen’s introduction is in a perverse sense the centerpiece of the anthology, outshining in its artfulness and vision most of the poems it proposes to discuss; it should be required reading for anyone interested in American poetry. Beginning with a recap of the cooked/uncooked debate, she traces the roots of contemporary American poetry to two main sources: British Romanticism and the 19th-century French avant-garde (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Apollinaire), both wellsprings of high modernism. She then provides a short and sweet guided tour of the last 60 years of American poetry, from Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, the birth of Confessional poetry, and the rise of the Beats, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School, to the later Deep Image movement, New Formalism, and Language (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry of the late 1970s.

By the 80s, Swensen asserts, the old binary was beginning to break down—thanks in part to the changing faces of publishing and academia and the rise of the Internet—and has continued to do so ever since. Accordingly, we find ourselves now in a “thriving center of alterity”, a “laterally ordered network” in which writers “inherit and adapt traits” from various traditions, and increasingly from the visual and fine arts.

So what does a hybrid poem actually look like? Here’s an excerpt from Etel Adnan’s “In/somnia”:

………………………XVIII

1. altered epi/fanny. zzzz
nerves—neurves.
in symmetry. for dormmant
lady in lace. in diamond

2. now transient horizon-
tal life. Buttes. slough
(slow, low) over . . .
?????

Or Forrest Gander’s “Poem”:

…. Some
. we say we..
…know go
like a window
…..dark.
..Pathetic
any remark
…..then.
They leave
..us, what
…we call
….them.

And here’s the beginning of Dean Young’s “Speck”:

What I have in common with the people of the future:
they don’t exist either.
What I have in common with people of the past:
Mother forgets me, I’m late for work.
Oh exquisite hammer, you liar.
The monkey do be loop da loop
in orthopedic shoes. Down monkey, down!

What do these poets have in common with each other? Nearly half of the hybrids have some California (often San Francisco) connection, while many others are or have been associated with power centres of the experimental American poetry scene like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the SUNY Buffalo Program in Poetics. Many of the poets hold academic posts, and only poets with three or more books were eligible for inclusion.

Inevitably, readers will find commonalities among the hybrids wherever they can. This reader, for instance, painstakingly observed that 60 of the 74 hybrid poets have poems in American Hybrid that are in some way about birds. The list begins with Etel Adnan, “The certitude of Space is brought / to me by a flight of birds,” and ends with Dean Young, “But hey, take it easy,/ little bird of fire.” The reason for this hy-birdiness is unclear, but it is fitting nonetheless. Many hybrid poems are themselves like birds: chirpy, flighty, annoying, inscrutable.

Some hybrid poems rhyme; most don’t. Some are typographically outrageous, others arranged in neat lines and stanzas. One hybrid poet uses hand-drawn football diagrams, while another makes a kind of shining poem-sun composed of single lines emanating from a circular core of white space (following a tradition of concrete poetry itself emanating from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes). Two hybrid poets, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Laura Mullen, write poems that extend horizontally across the page so you have to rotate the book 90 degrees clockwise, or read sideways. (Incidentally, another hybrid poet, John Ashbery, did this 47 years ago in The Tennis Court Oath.)

Hybrid poets have also breathed new life into the use of caesura, a break or a sense pause in verse often marked by white space between the words. In this regard, they have been inspired in equal parts by sources ranging from Beowulf to John Berryman’s Dream Songs. Sometimes, they break their lines into a kind of staggered ladder, a la William Carlos Williams. Other times they just write in prose. All of it flows from the postmodern horn of plenty.

Hybrid poets are by-and-large adept, though sometimes shallow, name-droppers from the western and eastern intellectual traditions. In American Hybrid alone, one finds direct references to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, the pre-socratics, Cornel West, Paul Celan, Hsuan Tsang (a possibly fictitious Buddhist monk), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ezra Pound, Sophocles, Maimonides, Alfred North Whitehead, Wallace Stevens, J.M. Coetzee, and Hegel. Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism also appear surprisingly often; indeed, the hybrids have a kind of neo-scholastic penchant for (often inane) logic-chopping and for communicating in breathtakingly precise terms.

Another hero of the hybrids, named by two separate poets in this anthology, is Velimir Khlebnikov, a prominent member of the Russian Futurist movement and one of the originators of Zaum. This influence is palpable, for instance, in Michael Burkard’s obsessive reiteration of the title word of ‘The Rearranger” (“The rearranger rearranging the rearranged…”), which calls to mind Khlebnikov’s treatment of “laugh” in his “Invocation of Laughter“. And then there’s Gertrude Stein, whose radical experiments with the English language in the first half of the 20th century have underwritten the projects of countless hybrid poets, from Lyn Hejinian to Juliana Spahr. It was Stein who called America “a space filled with moving”, as Lynn Emanuel tells us in her poem “In English in a Poem”. “But I hate being moving”, Emanuel adds, and so many hybrids would agree.

So what does a good hybrid poem look like? Here is Rae Armantrout’s “Generation” in its entirety, a fairy-tale-gone-wrong told with magical concision:

We know the story.

She turns
back to find her trail
devoured by birds.

The years; the
undergrowth.

Or Paul Hoover’s “Haikuisation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 56”:

Love, renew thy force.
Thy edge should blunter be than
tomorrow sharpened.

Or finally Brenda Hillman’s “Styrofoam Cup”, a clever, environmentally conscious adaptation of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (note the caesura):

thou still unravished…….thou
thou,……..thou bride

thou unstill,
thou unravished….unbride
unthou...…..unbride

In an act of editorial egalitarianism that belies the unevenness of the writing in Hybrid, Swensen and St. John have chosen to arrange their anthology in alphabetical order with a one-page biographical blurb and exactly six pages of text for each poet. A better choice might have been to include more writing from fewer poets (would 20 be too few?). While six pages is probably enough space for a balanced sampling from the strongest writers of short-medium length lyrics, such as Jennifer Moxley and D.A. Powell, it’s simply not enough for Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian, whose book-length projects really demand to be read in full. Even experienced readers will need time to find their bearings in this alphabetized “thriving center of alterity”.

Whether or not American Hybrid marks the end of the “anthology wars” (and it couldn’t matter less), it certainly marks an important moment in the history of experimental American poetry. In a recent interview that suggests her ambitions for Hybrid, Swensen speaks to the issue of experimentalism:

Experimental is not only still a useful term, it’s always a crucial term in poetry…Poetry has to keep trying out new forms of being in order to fulfill its mandate of “purifying the language of the tribe”, as Mallarmé put it, of keeping the tool that is language sharp enough to keep cutting into more of what was previously the unsayable.

This statement jibes with the achievement of American Hybrid, which, like most groundbreaking collections of experimental writing, proves, with notable exceptions, that the previously “unsayable” quite often turns out to be the unmemorable. We can blame this outcome on the hybrids’ widespread commitment to malleability and indeterminacy; many of the poems simply blend into each other because they seem to be pointlessly eccentric. In this amorphous anthology, cutting into the unsayable often proves a stale and programmatic exercise, a matter of putting words in unusual arrangements, using caesura, writing about birds.

This is not to sell short the achievement of the poets included in the anthology—the best of whom will be read for many, many years—but to note the degree to which the over-determined, totalizing influence of the hybrid model reduces them to a democratized mash-up of experimental parody. Poems of Democracy, indeed.

The question of linguistic purity, implicit in “Mallarmé’s mandate”, reveals a telling discrepancy in American Hybrid’s structure: whereas Swensen closes her introduction by invoking the mandate, St. John concludes his, rather pompously,  by stating that he is “persuaded by the idea of an American poetry based on plurality, not purity.”

And so the battle between “purity” and “plurality” begins, and we discover that Swensen and St. John were spoiling for an anthology war all along.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Frederick Seidel
Poems, 1959-2009
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009
528 pages
£27.00
978-0374126551

Isbn

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Combine a far-seeing industrialist.
With an Islamic fundamentalist.
With an Italian premier who doesn’t take bribes.
With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.
Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

—from “Milan”

With credentials like these, it should come as no surprise that Frederick Seidel has garnered little praise from the poetry establishment. But the establishment ought to be more wary of him. For the past 50 years, the reclusive Seidel has been assembling a kind of poetic dirty bomb targeted directly at the establishment’s most sacrosanct virtue: political correctness. Funded by the poet’s outrageous personal wealth and charged with lethal quantities of lust, loathing, arrogance, and gallows humor, Seidel’s bomb—Poems, 1959-2009—will deliver a prodigious payload (assuming there are enough poetry readers out there to register the impact).

By his own account, Seidel has “lived a life of laziness and luxury”, as he writes in the poem, “Frederick Seidel”. Dubbed by recent critics a “luxe, randy celebutante” and “laureate of the louche”, he seems to prefer the self-title “liar with a lyre”. At the same time, his friends all commend his generosity and interviewers often observe a shy, courtly man. Seidel, for his part, insists that what the reader struggles with “is that the man in the poems is the real man, while the man behind the poems just wants his privacy.” That said, it is hard to understand how a man like Seidel—equal parts playboy, hell’s angel, gentleman, and sado-masochist—can expect people to remain uninterested in him after reading his poems.

Frederick Seidel was born in 1936 to a life of privilege. The son of a wealthy coal magnate, he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard. In 1962, his first book, Final Solutions, was selected by Robert Lowell and other distinguished poets for the 92nd Street Y’s inaugural poetry award, featuring a cash prize and a publishing deal with Atheneum Press. But when the 26-year-old poet refused to remove allegedly libelous passages from his manuscript, the awarding body withdrew the prize and the panel of judges resigned in protest. Random House published Final Solutions the following year, though Seidel’s next book, Sunrise, was not to appear for 17 years. Since 1980, Seidel has published eight volumes of verse, including his latest, Poems, 1959-2009, which includes a short collection of new work titled “Evening Man”.

Like the scabrous persona (“Fred Seidel”) whom he tends to project, Frederick Seidel has a short list of hobbies: poetry, sex, dangerous machines (the “916” in the passage above refers to Seidel’s beloved Ducati 916 motorcycle), conspicuous consumption, and the desecration of liberal pieties (he has a poem titled “Feminists in Space”). If the phrase “the need for speed” didn’t already exist, Seidel would have been obliged to coin it. As he writes in “Dante’s Beatrice”, from Going Fast:

I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and I its.
All it lacked was tits.
All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.

This passage showcases Seidel’s love of excruciating, drumfire rhymes, other examples of which include “ready to get deady” (also from Going Fast) and “The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude / Made me lewd” (“Bologna”). “The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger”, he writes in “Climbing Everest”,

But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

I’m getting young.
I’m totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite
Which will turn me into light.
God is great! I suck her tongue.

I mean—my sunbursts, and there are cloudbursts.
My dynamite penis
Is totally into Venus.

No amount of Viagra could move most 70-year-olds to such a priapic frenzy. And while this might be the versified ramblings of a dirty old man, it is also refreshing satire. The irritating term “metrosexual” deserves to be deflated by a poem like “Climbing Everest”.

Seidel’s earliest work in Final Solutions, while already distinguished and calculated to cause offense, often reads like a racist pastiche of Robert Lowell’s confessional mode, penned by Woody Allen:

The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.

—from “Wanting to Live in Harlem”

In addition to his early debt to Robert Lowell (whom he interviewed in 1961 for the Paris Review), Seidel learned much from Ezra Pound, who promoted a poetics of intense compression and admonished poets always to seek the mot juste, the strikingly apt word or phrase. Seidel’s capacity for minting mots justes is off the charts, and his increasingly compressed work has only improved with each volume. In “The Pierre Hotel, New York, 1946”, for instance, he writes what might be mistaken for one of Pound’s short Imagist lyrics: “The bowl of a silver spoon held candlelight, / A glistening oyster of gold.”

Like so many other poets of his generation, Seidel made a pilgrimage to visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for treasonous WWII radio broadcasts. Embraced by Pound, as he writes in “Glory”, Seidel stayed in D.C. for a week, discussing poetry and hearing the great poet “fill the alcove with [the] glory” of Provençal and Italian verse. The 17-year-old poet even had the nerve to suggest two small corrections to Pound’s Confucius translations, having very little Chinese under his belt. Surprisingly, Pound adopted the corrections and sent Seidel to an associate at Harvard’s Yenching Institute, a man ominously named Achilles Fang.

“Achilles Fang” would be a perfect name for Seidel’s poetic persona, capturing the ludicrous and terrifying quality of his work. Seidel casts himself as a kind of modern Achilles, a god-like, foredoomed hero racing to a violent death on his Ducati 916, while also cultivating a certain fangs-bared vampiric flair. Both aspects of his voice are on display in “A Vampire in the Age of AIDS”, one of his most unnerving and representative poems:

He moves carefully away from the extremely small pieces
Of human beings spread around for miles, still in his leather seat.
He looks like a hunchback walking in the Concorde chair,
Bent over, strapped in, eyes on the ground
To avoid stepping on the soft.
He will use his influence to get
The cockpit voice recorder when it is recovered copied.
He loves the pilot in the last ninety seconds’
Matter-of-factness turning into weeping screams,
Undead in the double-breasted red velvet smoking jacket Huntsman made.

Is the wealthy vampire who travels by Concorde and wears a Huntsman suit Seidel? Does Seidel identify himself with AIDS? As usual, the pieces do not add up to a real person or to a coherent scenario. This poem might offend us, but the offensive agents remain unknown quantities. Plane crashes and AIDS are terrible, but what have they got to do with vampires? Though callous, this poem is also frighteningly controlled. The phrase “to avoid stepping on the soft” would have been ruined had Seidel finished it. Such is the considered delicacy of even Seidel’s most brutal images.

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is Deputy Poetry Editor at the Oxonian Review.