Wednesday, September 15, 2004
I actually am enjoying Stubborn Grew, but feel guilty about how scattershot my reading is currently. what Henry's doing touches an Olsonian nerve in me, not that Henry's approach is anything like Olson's. but SB, the whole project, is a poem written with history in mind. I still envy what Olson did, delving local history. I mean, he researched. that's where Henry connects with the Big O. and I am minded of John Clare with Henry's unflummoxed descriptive sense. he's pretty serious about the words he uses, he's accurate (like Clare), even while staying within the strictures of rhyme. which has certainly sent many a poem writer into laughable logical twists and syntactical vacations. SB's 1st line: "Time flowers on the lips of whispered clay". isn't that both strange and accurate? and I propose to bring Ron Silliman into this discussion, for his is an ear of subtle accuracy. the poem "Skies", for instance, is built on unornamented descriptions, and is lovely therefore. anyway, I'm getting the idea that I should drink a little bit whilst reading SB, if I take Henry's meaning aright. done and done. which reminds me of a decadent realization long ago. home from work (at a wine store), done with dinner. I had a glass of fine sherry, a piece of Stilton, and I was reading War and Peace. bring on the wood paneled home library, and the string quartet in the parlour!
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3 comments:
Yes, I think you are hitting on one of the singular aspects of Henry's project: its obsessive, minutiaed, *and* sweeping attention to history ("attention to" on such scale is also always "making of," to be sure). I can't think of any major American poet since Olson so ambitiously enraptured by the history of his or her location than Gould. (His enrapture with himself inside the poetry is largely misunderstood, I think, inasmuch as in Stubborn Grew "he" becomes dispersed, so to speak, into time and unfolding place. Anyway, no wonder he's little noticed so far, I say: the size and range of it all is extremely intimidating. In that sense he's kind of like (I've said this before, too) Alan Sondheim, a poet who couldn't be further red-shifted from HG, and who is also destined to be seen as major-major down the road.
Eventually there will be readers and critics galore for Gould. I've been saying such for a good while. His poetry is not my poetry, as he knows, but I honor his commitment to the art and his idiosyncratic genius inside that commitment. It's good to see that a few smart folks are beginning to at least take some cautious notice-- Jonathan Mayhew, for example, who's poetic predilections are quite different from Henry's(!) should be given a tip of the hat for paying at least grudging respects...
On another subject entirely (or maybe not, maybe it's still the same theme), what is the source of those lovely dark spore prints below? Augustus campestris?
Kent
You guys are terrific. &, of course, you are right!!! My only quibble : I don't find Jonathan Mayhew's response to be "grudging".
Henry Cat
re spoor prints, jeez, read just yesterday in the KJ interview at Here Comes Everybody, that himself engages in mushroom hunting. which, not to be doubtful, did sound un poco like a faux detail. not that it wasn't plausible. I didn't bother to attempt to identify the mushroom, I just like to make the prints. find them while walking the dog, and if I choose a properly youthful example, get it home in one piece, and keep the specimen from the curious paws of our dangerous cat, then I may get a decent print.
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