The rhythm for reading poetry is to read a short time and then ruminating much longer. It is different from the rhythm of prose fiction which is getting lost in a long flow, being absorbed in a different reality.
Thursday, August 31, 2023
When
When did books of poetry
start having 70 pages?
or 67? You know what I mean
Who decided that?
Who reads one
anyway?
Not a student
unless forced to
Random
A bookshelf is an autobiography. The books there and their order have private meanings. Books seemingly out of place have a reason for being next to strange bedfellows. I've apparently lost a few books that belong to the library, perhaps caught up in the chaos of my own collections and irretrievable.
Berrigan
I remember thinking of Ted Berrigan as just an O'Hara imitator. Then I got into his work more and discovered that there was more there, partly through her connection to Alice Notley, a poet I admire also.
Berrigan didn't realize when O'Hara wrote "It is 12:53" or something like that that he was narrating an episode in the past. Berrigan would look at the clock and write down the time it actually was. So what is seemingly the same technique becomes different in the "imitation."
I'm reading some Anselm Hollo. I purchased the $55 dollar collected poem for myself for my birthday. I ordered it from a local bookstore and they gave me a discount because the spine looked a bit weak, but what could you expect from a book of eleven hundred pages? I'm reminded of this because one of the sons of Ted and Alice is Anselm, also a very good poet. Hollo was Finnish and came to the US and knew Creeley and other US poets. I'm enjoying getting into a poet I hardly knew (knew mostly by name) for many years.
You can't really regret lapses in your past taste. If you didn't like someone when you were younger, that was just you being you. Or if you over-estimated a writer due to your inexperience, that's the same thing. I think it is bad to pretend to like what you don't. You can be polite, but just going along with the crowd... no...
Dream of job offer
A black woman was recruiting me for a job. It would pay $100,000 more a year in private industry. Why I was qualified, or what the job actually was, was rather vague. We ended up in an apartment complex, as if to say, this is what you could afford on this salary. The furnishings in the apartment were nice, with a high top table. It was suggested we watch some old movies together. Then the dream morphed into other vague, unmemorable events...
Alberti
María Asunción Mateo married the poet Rafael Alberti after his return to Spain from a long exile. (He was born in 1902, she in 1944.) She clashed with young group of poets who wanted to use Alberti for their own purposes. Things got very ugly. Now she's coming out with a book outlining the events. Alberti erased the García Montero group from his memoirs. He had bugged Alberti for a prologue to a book, and Alberti finally said that he (LGM) could write it himself and Alberti would sign off on it. Of course, he would write something great about himself! Alberti said that he wouldn't even say those kind of things about Neruda.
https://www.pressreader.com/spain/la-vanguardia/20230831/282239490193766
Gossip aside, it is clear that there is no respect for the LGM group. I've always felt that skewering mediocrity is kind of sacred duty. I've always been uncomfortable with the emperor's new clothes situation, where everyone knows the truth but nobody wants to say it.
Mateo cuenta que "al haberle pedido insistentemente un prólogo para un poemario suyo" García Montero a Alberti, éste "que no disponía de tiempo ni tampoco de ganas, le dijo que se lo escribiese él mismo utilizando su nombre, con pleno permiso. El entonces muchacho, solapado de falsa bondad, contaba con su afecto y con determinado respeto por su actividad intelectual, aunque no así por su poesía, de la que en privado comentaba que 'le faltaba temblor' (Rafael siempre sostuvo que el mejor poeta de ese grupo, con abisal diferencia, era el malogrado Javier Egea)".
"Una vez acabado el prólogo, vino a casa -la de Madrid- para leérselo. Rafael se quedó atónito al escucharlo, casi sin saber qué decirle y salvó la difícil situación con una sonrisa irónica, exclamando: ¡Caray! ¡Qué barbaridad! ¡Eso no lo he dicho yo ni de Neruda!".
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Bodas
I've found some more things with Bodas de sangre.
*There was another runaway bride, in Córdoba, in 1928.
*The second Madrid production featured more "surreal" designs for scenery.
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