People love to make lists. It’s fun and occasionally instructive. For reasons of no particular relevance, I’ve been thinking about “top ten” lists lately, and here’s what I’ve come up with in three important categories for me. In all cases, I’ve restricted myself to a single work by a particular artist and have chosen specific works rather than compilation works (e.g., greatest hits, selected poems, etc.).
(All lists are not rank ordered)
Albums
John Coltrane, Ballads
Charles Mingus, East Coasting
Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster
Art Tatum and Ben Webster, Group Masterpieces
Thelonious Monk, Live at the It Club
Dave Alvin, Blue Boulevard
Dwight Yoakam, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (Expanded Edition)
Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Deluxe Edition)
Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
REM, Automatic for the People
Novels
James Joyce, Ulysses
John Fowles, Daniel Martin
John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Peter Matthiessen, Killing Mister Watson
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Larry Woiwode, Beyond the Bedroom Wall
Vladimir Nobokov, Pale Fire
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Poetry
Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All
Jack Gilbert, Monolithos
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Robert Frost, North of Boston
Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos
Kenneth Rexroth, The Phoenix and the Tortoise
Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin
Galway Kinnell, The Past
Muriel Rukeyser, The Gates
David Lee, Porcine Canticles
11 comments:
Well, this list certainly offers insights into Hoey influences. Very instructive. Only the Ezra Pound thing just doesn't fit. Throwing us off the track?
Not off the track--a fundamental piece of the puzzle.
Puzzle? If I play the Pisan cantos backward does it say New Formalism? Or Mussolini's dead, miss him, man?
Allen, you're anti-modernist, and that's okay. Pound is non-linear. You're not. Pound writes cadenced line. You don't (not recently).
I've just been struggling myself recently with the challenge of Pound's really bad politics and good art. Which do you choose?
I guess if you've read it lately and like it fine. But it seems like opening an old wound.
And would you have ever liked Rexroth if not for Gilbert?
Pound-->Rexroth-->Gilbert. Not necessarily the most direct line, but the dots connect. I was actually reading Rexroth before I was reading Gilbert. Hmm. I've never thought of myself as an anti-Modernist. I mean, James Joyce is my favorite novelist, and Ulysses is my favorite. (Finnegans Wake is a great read, but I'm not really sure it's a novel.)
Actually, as I think about it more, I'd have to say that Modernism has had a strong influence on my work. This is probably most visible in my first novel, Chasing the Dragon, which is anything but a linear, plot-driven piece. In terms of poetry, Pound, WCW, Stevens, and Yeats all stand at the doorway of my understanding of how poetry works and what it can do. (As far as Pound's politics--what can you do? He essentially recreated American poetry--hard to dismiss.) Pound may be the only strict Modernist in the list of favorite volumes of poetry, but look at the list of novels.
I've posted on this topic, but I've had another thought. Carruth considers Pound one his significant influences. That kind of provides a somewhat more direct line of descent. When Country Music comes out, the middle section, Reply to the Chinese Masters, may also show some more obvious links.
Wow, so many strands. Don't know where to start. Yes, Carruth's unfinished doctoral dissertation was on Pound, I'm sure. A lot Carruth's later stuff, in strict form, he's one of the greats in that area, seems to me to go back to the 19th century, possibly Victorian, as if modernism never happened. Sleeping beauty is very modernist, but didn't catch on.
In school, we couldn't help but be exposed to modernism and told it was good. I remember you were more partial to Yeats.
I do really like the poem about Pound you posted. Never saw it. No included in the book from that era?
The end is fantastic. More people should see that.
Sorry for the typos. Not used to this medium.
Forgot - in school you were the modern poetry teacher - only class on the subject I ever took purely. Yeah, you're tastes in fiction are more obviouly modernist. Am really looking forward to the Country Music book - samples are fantastic.
Rexroth was involved in the Objectivist movement with Eliot and Zukofsky. Can't remember Pound's role - that's one connection.
Recently read a biography of Jack Spicer and was surprised how much Jack Gilbert was mentioned. Gilbert seems to have been closest to Rexroth. But he took Spicer's famous poetry/magic workshop. Now I see a lot Spicer in - what was the Yale book? - Views of Jeoprardy? (probably slaughtered that). I think Jack Gilbert owes a debt to Jack Spicer. And I do think Gilbert is one of the contemporary greats. So glad he was at SU. What a piece of luck.
Actually, the Pound poem is brand new. Worked on it today--stimulated by this exchange.
What I like most about your Pound poem is the trace of anaphora (echo of Whitman?)built into the (mostly) enjambed (Williams?) lines: 2x "I'd like to say" presented disjuntively (?) at different places in the line.
Most interesting: The poem is 17 lines. The first "I'd like to say" appears in line #9: the exact center of the poem, numerically speaking: 8 lines above, 8 lines below. This gives it a nice classical balance and structure - something Pound would have approved of, but disrupted (now I find the word!) by enjambs.
On purpose? Conscious? Eager readers want to know.
You've always been better at analyzing my poems than I am. "On purpose" is a peculiar concept. I think it was Don Hall who wrote about this process that anything in a poem was deliberate if he kept it in the poem, regardless of whether it was a conscious choice at the time of initial composition. That underscores the role of the unconscious in writing, as well, I think, as the ways in which, if we spend time on the actual craft, we internalize our sense of how to shape the materials.
I have a fondness for anaphora; who knows where I got it? It could be Whitman, certainly Kit Smart uses it extensively in Jubilati Agno. Most likely, it came from reading and hearing the King James Bible when I was a child. For many Western writers, that an early and strong influence.
I also like verbal music in poems--the friction of sounds as they rub together. I'm not always very aware of that aspect of writing a poem as I'm doing it; it's the way that language occurs to me when I'm writing poetry.
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