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Friday, January 9, 2015

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (1)

1. One of my chapters dealt with Creeley's "After Lorca" and Spicer's After Lorca but I missed Padgett's "After Lorca." One of my ideas was that New York School poets were the unheralded champions of Lorca, and I had chapters on O'Hara and Koch. I am a great admirer of Padgett, since my high school days, and yet this poem escaped my attention until yesterday, literally, when I was leafing through a copy of his collected poems that I had had since the summer. None of my New York School contacts told me about it; they probably never remembered it existed. I got it for my birthday in August. It is not an extraordinary poem for all of you, maybe, but it demonstrates a nice parodic vein in American Lorquismo. It's got that nice silly repetition vibe going on.

The lesson is a bit of epistemological humility. The new things I discover in the American reception of Lorca are things that are close to me, but that had escaped my attention. I find them when I am not looking for them, but pursuing other interests.