Thursday Blogasbord - News

Whoa. First a poem by the fantabulous Sandra Beasley (r.) appears in Slate (picked by Robert Pinksy), and then the encroyable Sarah Browning (l.) has her book Whiskey in the Garden of Eden show up all reviewed and spiffy on the Poetry Foundation blog! May a thousand flowers bloom for both SB's. Vrzhu salutes you! DC poets rule.

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The Map: This quote from Helen Vendler connects the New York School to Whitman. An editorial comment appends:

It is not surprising that critics have found him self-indulgent . . . the poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification. . . . Unlike the "message" of committed poetry, [O'Hara's work] incites one to all the programs of commitment as well as to every other form of self-realization--interpersonal, Dionysian, occult, or abstract. Such a program is absolutely new in poetry.

That last phrase--"absolutely new"--is not entirely accurate: Whitman said repeatedly that he was not preaching a program, but actively urging his readers to find their own form of self-realization. Yet Whitman's messianic voice turned his first readers into devotees rather than seekers of personal authenticity. What is new in O'Hara and Ashbery is their refusal of an earnestly didactic tone. Describing O'Hara's poetry, Ashbery staked out his own territory as well--states of consciousness, demotic language, a democratic inclusiveness of mention:

Surrealism was after all limited to the unconscious and O'Hara throws in the conscious as well--doesn't it exist too? Why should our unconscious thoughts be more meaningful than our conscious ones . . . ? Here everything "belongs": unrefined autobiographical fragments, names of movie stars and operas, obscene interjections, quotations from letters--the élan of the poem is such that for the poet merely to mention something creates a place for it, ennobles it, makes us realize how important it has always been for us.

This, too, is a Whitmanian program: mentioning something to create a place for it is surely the justification of Whitman's catalogues. But the New York postwar writers, from O'Hara to Koch to Schuyler to Ashbery, extended the things mentioned beyond what Whitman had thought possible.

Editorial comment: If this is true, and it certainly seems so, it's not just  Ginsberg, who explicitly states his lineage, who descends from Whitman, but also O'Hara, and Ashbery, who never explicitly put their lineage to the fore, and their implicit antecedents are mostly French, or, in any case, not Whitman. Frank O'Hara is so much the opposite of a beat poet that he is often mistaken for one.

The Territory: this quote by Walt:

Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea.

The Map: this quote:

The grotesque prudishness and archness with which garlic is treated...has led to the superstition that rubbing the bowl with it before putting the salad in gives sufficient flavor. It rather depends on whether you are going to eat the bowl or the salad.

-Elizabeth David

The territory: This clip:

Comments

[Sarah]

Thanks, Michael!!