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PAUL ZUKOFSKY AND THE AVANTGARDE'S ANGER

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it's strange, this furor and anger directed by Goldsmith and the other avanties at Paul Zukofsky for asserting his ownership under the copyright laws—

isn't he simply claiming what others enjoy, other heirs of literary estates?

why is he any different, any less entitled than the heirs of Robert Lowell?

I'd love to publish a volume where all of Lowell's "imitations" were collated chronologically with notes, but!

I know the reaction to Paul Zukofsky has something to do with the history of avantgarde esthetics and its bizarre delusions of outlawry—

or perhaps the contempt and disregard directed at him has other historical precedents, left over from eras when a Zukofsky was granted less rights than a Lowell——

no, it's probably not antisemitism, per se,

but rather the outrage felt toward a traitor to one's cause—

our comrade has betrayed us, the avanties cry,

hurt by what they feel is disloyalty to the holy tenets

of their faith . . . they feel wounded by his, Paul Zukofsky's, renunciation

of their sacred creed ...

As always the faithful hate an apostate more an unbeliever,

a heretic more than a heathen.

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rich white straight male poets need not apply

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here's Charles Simic on the NYRB blog:

"No recent book of poetry has been reviewed as widely and as favorably as Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009. It seems as if every major newspaper and literary magazine on both sides of the Atlantic has already published an admiring piece on the poet and we can expect more accolades to come. “Thank God for Fred Seidel,” Michael Hofmann concludes a review of the book in September issue of Poetry. Adam Kirsch agrees, calling Seidel perhaps the best American poet alive. Even the critics who have expressed a few reservations about his poetry agree that he’s never boring. . . ."

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Since the publication of Seidel's book in March, it has been widely recognized as the most important volume of verse to appear in 2009—

as Simic summarizes, the Seidel has gained a critical consensus unmatched among this year's crop of poetry books—

so why, one wonders, is "Poems 1959-2009" not on the list of noms for the National Book Award?

**
here's the NBA list, as selected by judges Mei-Mei Berssenbruge, A. Van Jordan, Cole Swenson, and Kevin Young:

Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)

Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)

Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

**
Where's the Seidel book?

Critically acclaimed as the book of the year, and what, it's not even on the NBA shortlist—what's with that?

I asked C. Dale Young about this on his always-interesting blog "Avoiding the Muse" and here's his answer to me:

C. Dale said...

Sometimes the NBA doesn't consider collected poems or selected poems. The committee of judges decides that before they begin reading. Maybe this year the judges decided not to consider Collecteds.

**

So it seems the "committee of judges" for this year's NBA poetry prize

has "decided not to consider Collecteds,"

thus ensuring that the Seidel book is out of the running . . .

**
I hold no brief for Frederic Seidel, he's far from one of my favorites,

but this egregious decision by the NBA judges to preemptively exclude his book is, I think, scandalous—

how absurd, that this extraordinarily celebrated and admired book should be banned by the NBA because of, well, what else can you call it but bias?

**
I sympathize with the judges: last year's NBA went to a rich white straight male poet (Robert Halfhass),

so of course for the sake of diversity they were loath to give it this year

to an even richer white straight male poet,

no matter how much praise his book has received—

"Poems 1959-2009" has been overwhelmingly hailed and lauded since its publication on March 31, 2009—

hasn't it been established as the the Poetry Book of the Year by many of the most eminent critics of our time (see quotes below): hasn't their advocacy elevated this book to an unique status and significance?

so it's no wonder that the NBA judges opted to preclude it, and via a technicality to render it ineligible—

their cowardly decision is understandable.

After all, they probably said, the bastard is sure to cop the Pulitzer and other prizes—

but for the judges to use this sneaky, underhanded act of entailment—

to gerrymander Seidel out of contention—

they can 'disqualify' the elephant in the room all they want, but that won't stop him from trampling them—

**

The National Book Award for poetry goes to the best book of poetry published in the previous 12-month period,

except when it doesn't.

Except when the judges manipulate the rules and change the criteria to suit their agendas.

Shame on the National Book Awards organization for allowing bad-faith ploys like this, for winking at this kind of double-dealing machination.

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Frankly, the NBA Po judges are chickenshit. They're afraid to reject Seidel straightforwardly, so they adopt this pusillanimous bullshit rule of not considering selecteds/collecteds, and hide themselves behind it . . .

What are they hiding from?

In short, this:

“The most frightening American poet ever—phallus-man, hangman of political barbarism—Seidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved.”—Calvin Bedient, Boston Review

“He radiates heat. It is apparent that he has asked himself frightful questions and has not dodged the implications of their equally frightful answers . . . A master of metaphor.”—Louise Bogan, The New Yorker

“Beguiling and magisterial.”—Joel Brouwer, The New York Times Book Review

“Profoundly beautiful . . . The writer willing to say the unsayable.”—Philip Connors, n+1

“The best verse out of the United States since whenever.”—Joe Fiorito, The Toronto Star

“Among the two or three finest poets writing in English.”—Alex Halberstadt, New York

“[Final Solutions] seems to me one of the most moving and powerful books of poetry to have come along in years.”—Anthony Hecht, The New York Review of Books

“Area Code 212 [is] our new Waste Land, as monitory and radical . . . as Eliot’s poem was in 1922.”—George Held, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A triumphant outsider in American poetry . . . He takes risks utterly unthinkable, even as merely mutinous provocation, in an academic workshop.”—Ernest Hilbert, Contemporary Poetry Review

“[Life on Earth] is an exemplary book . . . One of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years.”—Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . His poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today

“In American poetry today there is no one with Frederick Seidel’s sheer ambition, comprehensive sense of our times, sophistication, nerve and skill . . . One of the most vital and important poets we have.”—Lawrence Joseph, The Nation

“The excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite: this is what everyone notices in Seidel. Yet he wouldn’t be so special or powerful a poet of what’s cruel, corrupt, and horrifying had he not also lately shown himself to be a great poet of innocence.”—Benjamin Kunkel, Harper’s Magazine

“In the desert of contemporary American poetry, Frederick Seidel’s work awaits the weary reader like an oasis.”—James Lasdun, The Guardian

“Here is the new kind of visionary, the person who really wants to change the world fast, the person who believes in something.”—Adam Phillips, Raritan

“Frederick Seidel is a ghoul, and he has produced this nascent century's finest collection of English poems.”—Michael Robbins, Chicago Review

***

>>>>>>

p.s.:

here's C. Dale Young in response to my post above:

C. Dale said...

BK,

I offered a postulate, a hypothesis. I did not offer a reason. I do not work for the NBA, nor did I contact them about whether or not they are considering Collecteds for this round. I simply posted what I have heard from people in the past. You are trying the NBA and its judges in the Court of Public Opinion using my guess as evidence when it is still just that, a guess.

8:38 AM

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jeepers, I wonder what Young means by "court of public opinion",

the 2-3 nobodies that might glance at this blogsite once or twice a week?

Young himself never links to or mentions any of my posts here, so I'm surprised he imagines anybody else is reading and responding to anything on these pages—

**

NOBEL IDIOTS

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Once again, the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to an idiot.

How many years in a row now is it that the Swedish Academy has lauded idiots with this ultimate honor.

Here's some idiot in the NYTimes:
"Should Ms. Oates and Mr. Roth, Mr. Pynchon and Mr. DeLillo never win a Nobel, however, they will be in exalted company. Among those who never won the Nobel Prize: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust."

The Times idiot doesn't mention a single poet: natch.

Pound, Frost, Stevens, WC Williams, Auden, Bishop, Larkin: just to list past poets writing in English who should have won Nobels and didn't.

What a disgrace that the prize has not gone to living poets like Ashbery, Bonnefoy, Tanikawa et al (make your own list) . . .

The latest idiot:—Helga Muller: well, if they wanted to give it to a woman writer in her middle years of age, it should have been the great Carol Ann Duffy—

but Duffy is a poet, and poets only get the Nobel on those odd-once-every-decade-or-two occasions

when the idiots at the SwedAcad can't agree on which idiot to choose,

so it seems . . .

*

I'm using the word "idiot" in its original meaning, from ancient Greece.

To quote a sentence in the Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (p. 561)—from its definition of "idiot":
'The Greeks have the expressions,

"a priest or an idiot" (layman),

"a poet or an idiot" (prose-writer).'


**

*

when I was young I used to mail inscribed copies of my books to poets I admired, until i started finding those profusely-signed copies in used bookstores and realized that of course those famous poets disposed of the books i sent them as quick-riddancely as all the other junk freebies they received . . .

at which point i decided to cut out the middleman:

i still inscribed my books to famous poets but rather than mail the books to those famous poets, i would instead simply leave the books inscribed to them on the shelves of secondhand bookstores or in Goodwill bookbins,

and if you look on abebooks today you'll see booksellers hawking those copies inscribed to famous poets

at ridiculous prices, prices based not on the merit of my books or me, but based on their "association" with those famous poets . . .

anybody who buys my dead tree volumes from abebooks is a sucker anyway when they can read and or download all my work for free at Lulu.com via the link on this blog!

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But there was one famous poet i really did continue to mail inscribed books to:

James Tate . . .

—until, that is, one of his ex-students confided to me what Tate did with the books I sent him—

(and they deserved the fate he dealt them:)

he used them as door-stops—that's right,

he would wedge them in under the door of his office at UMass Amherst,

(He liked to kick at 'em as he went in and out)

and he would point them out to his students, saying isn't that a good way to recycle wastepaper?

Plus it had the added pedagogical benefit of acting as a lesson warning to those students:

'See where you'll be if you don't do what I tell you to do!

You wanna be a failure, you wanna end up like that, that knottwad?'

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p.s.

some of those books on abebooks i may have actually mailed to those famous poets who then jettisoned them to the used books store etcet,

because although i resolved with native hue to stop sending out such inscribed books, the reality heft of the new book in my hand sometimes sicklied me o'er with cowardly hope that famous poet A or X might, might this time be receptive to my obsequiously offered tome . . .

so some of those association-books may be "authentic", but which is and which ain't is anybody's guess . . .

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