two scenes from Ian Hamilton

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If you were as bored as I was by that arrogant hack Michael Hofmann's pathetic efforts to lump himself with the Legend of Ian Hamilton via the Jan 2010 issue of Poetry (Chicago),

here are a couple Hamilton squibs by much finer sources:

first, from the TLS: Hugo Williams' column (p.16, April 17/09), recounting a story from one of Hamilton's USA pobiz-crawls wherein he encountered, quote:

a certain professor who had gone on about the work of Clayton Eshleman. "Just a tremendous poet", he said. Surprised by this, Ian asked for the title of a good poem by Eshleman. "Oh, I don't know", said the professor. "Taken as a whole, you see. Just a tremendous poet." Ian insisted on knowing the name of a single decent poem so he'd be able to understand what the professor was talking about. "Oh for God's sake", the man said. "What is this anthologist's approach to literature?"
...

and here, from Simon Gray's "The Smoking Diaries," page 29, where Gray, after confessing his lifelong dislike of Auden, ruefully acknowledges:

". . . anyway, I've got to face it, almost everybody I like and a lot of people I admire, like and admire Auden, I used to admit as much as I nagged away at Ian [Hamilton], nagged frenetically away, even claiming once I had evidence to prove Auden was autistic—what evidence? Ian asked,—well, I said, he liked to pick his nose and eat it in front of people, and then, well, the poems! I said triumphantly, take 'In Praise of Limestone' and off I went— 'Actually, Auden stinks,' he said, out of nowhere, during one of our very last conversations, 'but his forms, you see, the way he could play about with forms'—and that was it, for him, as a practising poet there was an astonishing skill to be admired and studied. If you weren't a poet and were after meaning, sense and feeling you [wouldn't look to Auden], but if you had a technical interest in rhyme schemes, etc., for their own sake, and for the sake of your own practice, then Auden was worth your while—and so we left it at that, for the rest of his [Hamilton's] life, or at least of my time with him."

...
Gray's book has other evocative pages re Hamilton . . . Gray knew/was friends with him from university days:
one of his most successful plays, The Common Pursuit (subtitled 'Scenes from the Literary Life'), features as its key character ('Stuart') a simulacrum of Hamilton.

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Inexpensive copies of The Common Pursuit are available at Amazon—the used hardcover page has copies for under a dollar—if it's the same hardcover edition I have, it will have a four-page insert of photos from the first USA production (with an exuberantly-young Nathan Lane in 3 of the pics)—

it's a great play, a fun play to read, and should be particularly fascinating to anyone who's ever aspired toward 'the literary life' . . .

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creatively unoriginal

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—is Lowell’s “Imitations” a model for the cre­atively uno­rig­i­nal era some perloffs and profs are hail­ing the advent of . . .

if all verse con­sists of vari­ant recom­bi­na­tions of past verse, as the first pla­gia­rist Orpheus liked to claim, then

aren’t Lowell’s bril­liant recon­fig­u­ra­tions of Leop­ardi et al

to be espe­cially admired and emulated—

but can anybody/everybody follow his exam­ple with equal success—

or is it Lowell’s unique expertise/craft/handling that makes these trans­la­tions so brilliant—?

(con­cep­tion or exe­cu­tion? con­tent or form? Koons or Hock­ney?)

you can’t down­load his tal­ents, or at least not yet—

as brilliant young poet and critic Michael Rob­bins observes of Lowell: “he could sculpt a stanza with a pre­ci­sion of tone, dic­tion, imagery, sound, & meter. . . ”

maybe stanza-​sculpting soft­ware will per­form that task for poets in the near future?

let the app do the cot­tage indus­trial dirty­work of composition—

com­put­ers can already prob­a­bly write more skil­fully than most poets . . .

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geeze wheeze

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. . . the disputations of eras—

often when we older poets look at the verse of those younger we're befuddled or hostile—

on those rare occasions a young poet asks me to write a blurb, it puzzles me why: why would they want the approbation of someone my age: really?

(it may be cynical, but I can't believe they honestly want my approval in any case—)

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It's not just that I don't have the energy or time to "keep up" with their work: it's that if I were their age I wouldn't care what that 70-year-old fade what'shisKnott thinks,

so if I wouldn't care, why should I?

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(Hey, yo-po, if I like your stuff, that should warn you there must be something wrong with it—)

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The merciful dispensations of time allow us oldsters to be placated and distracted somewhat when considering the horrible fact of our oh so imminent demise, by looking at the young and gloating to ourselves, Well I certainly wouldn't want to be in their shoes! I'm glad I'm not like them! etc.

A poem about it from a couple years ago:

THERE'S THE RUB

Envying young poets the rage
You wish you could reverse your night
And blaze out born on every page
As old as them, as debut-bright.

Child of that prodigal spotlight
Whose wattage now is theirs to wage—
What gold star rite you wish you might
Raise revised to its first prize stage.

But listen to my wizened sage:
He claims there's one disadvantage
Should time renew you neophyte—

There'd be one catch you'd hate, one spite:
Remember if you were their age
You'd have to write the way they write.

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Obviously the young differentiate themselves from their predecessors in order to further their own development and sense of worth,

but might their rebellions or deviations also be motivated by kindness and pity for those of us who must soon die—

by unselfishly choosing to alienate and outrage us,

they help us dose our daily dread: how palliative the muttering placebo of contrastation with, and ritual protestation at,

their wrongness—

but do we appreciate how compassionate this errancy may be?

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maybe book after a no way book

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I'm trying to edit together a book of my poems "for young readers", which I'm hoping to complete, but—

it's proceeding from a collection of "whimsical" poems which I was unable to collate or cohere—

something of my confusion regarding the latter can be seen in the "afterword" I wrote for it:

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Backass Note

My whimsical poems are for the most part conceptual rather than linguistic. . . I'm too inhibited and puritanical to indulge in sound for sound's sake. I admire those who can write nonsense verse, but that whole wibblety wobblety world of wordplay is beyond me. . . (Roger McGough for one can do both the sound and the sense equally brilliantly; I envy his genius.) Puns, if they occur, are usuallly derived from metaphor rather than sound-association; indeed, I am usually surprised when people point out a "pun" in one of my poems, because I rarely intend them; they're mostly inadvertant. I make a conscious effort to work from the synonym: my thesaurus is always at hand. For me the content comes first; plot is always uppermost in my thoughts: though after that's set, formal concerns of style or sound-patterns may evolve in a further elaboration.

What do I mean by whimsical? Is it a category separate from others, a genre? Its subject matter is often trivial: kites, balloons, umbrellas, barbershops or hair in general, honeymoons and drinking fountains. And maybe the whimsical poem never tries to be funny (!), it's too complacent for that. Halfway between a-mused and be-mused. Smug-like, it doesn't care. It doesn't show off with insouciance and lyrical dandyisms (for the most part). Indeed, it often has an air of earnestness, though towards what end is not always evident. It thrives on its arbitrariness, but it does seem to have a purpose in mind. It doesn't want to be ironic or satiric, I think. But even if I have somewhat successfully defined the whimsical poem here, have I managed to (ever) actually write one?

.....

american (sic) hybrid

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A quote from Holderlin:

"There is only one real quarrel in the world: which is more important, the whole or the individual part."

Poetry, or the poem?

Process, or product?

In practice, poets do seem to make a choice between the two—I'm hardly the first to note this . . .

I'm sorry, but I don't think this "one real quarrel" can be ended or resolved by proclamation—

Of course you can always assert that your "American [sic] Hybrid" has transcended this argument,

and sell your illusory empty amalgam,

market your scam (or dream) . . . but?

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As to which option is preferable, surely it depends on the personality of the poet?

"The whole" or "poetry" worked for O'Hara,

while "the individual part" or "the poem" worked for Larkin.

You can't say either of them made the wrong choice.


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nother reason I quit the Pobiz

Michael Robbins on my malfeasance:

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(see my earlier post on this: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/11/plus-ca-change.html . . . )

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This is one of his many imprecations against me, as featured on his blog:

"Some of the Lulu books are prefaced by two pages of anti-blurbs (”[Bill Knott is] incompetent” & so on), many of them wrenched from the context of appreciative reviews, by the likes of Christopher Ricks . . ."

I can't find my xerox of the Christopher Ricks review (The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1970 issue), but have ordered another one which should arrive in about a week and which I will then scan in its entirety onto this blog as a jpeg file, where anyone can make their own judgement as to whether it is indeed an "appreciative review" . . .

To say that "many of" the quotes I print in my LULU books are "wrenched from the context of appreciative reviews" is untrue—one or two of them may be wrenched thus, though I would dispute even that, and would claim that even those one or two are not inaccurate in spirit—

and then there's this: in many of the LULU books I also include two pages of favorable blurbs and excerpts from reviews which actually are appreciative—

Does Michael Robbins consider these latter also fraudulent?

All the quotes I use are sourced, and all those sources can be checked out by anyone who wants the truth,

though I suspect that these sensationalist accusations of my malfeasance in this matter

are a paparazzian fanfaronade so coquettish in its hyberbole, so gossipy-glicksome,

that few if any will bother to seek out and verify the mere factual.

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