Southern Bookman

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

Farewell, Paul Fussell

After reading Paul Fussell's obituary in The New York Times, I found on a dusty bookshelf at home Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell's study of the English literature that emerged from World War I began my abiding interest in the global bloodbath from 1914 to 1918 that wrecked European civilization and, as Fussell registered, brought forth a new ironic consciousness.

Beginning with Fussell's book, I've deeply studied what was called the "war to end all wars." One of my favorite books is an anthology of poetry and fiction from all countries embroiled in the war; the disillusion and ironic style Fussell analyzes in English writing was universal. The combination of the writers' high culture and the squalor of the trenches has always given me a deep tragic sense.

His examination of disillusion of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves (I'd previously read "Goodbye to All That") arrived during the crashing wave of Vietnam-era books, articles and movies. The anti-war and anti-establishment anger had been numbed by the advent of disco -- preceding Fussell's death were those of Robin Gibb and Donna Summer -- and Fussell's book achieved surprising popularity. The World War I era he evoked mirrored the contemporary post Watergate, post-Vietnam epoch. Fussell's book did for the great war's literature what Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore" did for the writings from the American Civil War.

I read other books by Fussell, his biography of Samuel Johnson, his study of the meter and form of English poetry, and his harrowing memoir of his World War II service as a young infantry soldier in Europe. He wrote with the classic elegance of English writers like Johnson, William Hazlitt and Walter Pater while maintaining a modern accessibility. In later life, he blasted U.S. culture with devastating, if heavy-handed, accuracy, an American version of British curmudgeons like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. A telling sign of the triumph of mass popular tastes over the classic values Fussell championed was that Summer's obituary, unlike Fussell's, made the Times front page.

If much of Fussell's rants at the debased mass culture will likely fade, his "Great War and Modern Memory" will be one of the books read for generations.

Memoirs of Punk Glory

I've been reading a cluster of memoirs from the 1960s-1970s on the punk/left wing/hippie era of New York City, from the lower east side over to the Village. All three I downloaded on my Nook, which seems all too easy too do, like another glass of wine when it's going down smooth. I doubt any of them will be on Rick Santorum's list, or that of any other GOP candidate for that matter, although Ron Paul might enjoy the liberatarian spirit of the times.

The first finished, Patti Smith's "Just Kids," about her love affair/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. As the 60s were burning out, and the '70s came like the horrible morning after, Patti came out with her "Horses," which I quite liked if I recall. The cover photo was by Mapplethorpe, which I'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, until I read the book. Despite her wild, cutting edge personna, Smih comes across in her book as a shy, nice, small-town girl, an innocent in the big city always finding a new man to cake care of her. The first part of the book talks about her meeting Mapplethorpe and her close early relationship with him, and it begins with narrative energy from the time-honored motif of two kids from the sticks in Manhattan. Then, as they hang on and establish a daily life of trying to become artists, the book's drive dissipates, with too much mundane detail about squalid apartments, bad jobs, folks met and drinks downed. At end end, the book regains its opening power, fnishing with a poingnant account of Mapplethorpe's death.

The lastest I'm reading is James Walcott's account of the same time, wrriten from his jounalist's perspective. Walcott is a more fluid writer than Smith, better able to give dramatic force to the details and anecdotes he recalls, although he often overreaches with his verbal effects. His hip asides are amusing when on-target, but are annoying when he goes amiss. He too hits a dead zone in the middle of the book,which I hope he spins out of soon.

The most disappointing one is Ed Sanders' memoirs about the Fugs and his Peace Eye Bookstore, As with Smioth, he piles on surfeit of details that read more like a private diary without putting them in a broader context for the reader. The book is still entertaining, but too many chapters pile up with unrefined facts about places played, folks met, songs written.

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Memories of Howard Nemerov at Sewanee

Southern Bookman and its companion blog Chasing the Blues have been moribund in recent weeks as I've been cosumed with my news site Buckhead Patch. At last, on a cold, bright and windy Saturday, I find some time to return.

I'm inspired by the memory of Howard Nemerov at Sewanee. The other night, needing a garmet for sleep, I pulled out from the back of a drawer the tattered, torn T-shirt of the first Sewanee Writers Conference, with a quote from Howard, in a poem about walking a dog, "To show who's master, I write the poem."

Like Proust's madeleine, the T-shirt summoned my first memory of Howard. He stood in short purple shorts, a sweatshirt or jacket, and wore sandals with socks. With his gray hair, large beaked nose and craggy features, he looked like a member of some exotic bird species. His deep, voluminous voice was unforgettable; it still plays in my mind.

The poor man was already battling the cancer that would kill him. I struck up a friendship with him; he was warm and friendly, although his criticism of fledgling poets' work was cutting and brutal. I was thankful I hadn't submitted my poor earnest work to him for individual criticism, but rather to the kind Emily Grosholz.

The next year, he was too ill to appear at Sewanee. I'd sent him a letter or two, and he responded with postcards with his flowing signature. His place was taken by John Hollander, who rather deftly cut up my poems, with one sentence stll stinging "This line is egregious."

I believe it was at that second Sewanee session that I learned that Howard was the brother of Diane Arbus. As a young man, I'd seen an exhibition of Arbus' work at the New Orleans art museum. Her black and white portraits of freaks, giants, and regular people in moments of anger or turmoil changed my aesthetic perceptions. I quickly hurried to read Howard's eulogy to his sister, who committed suicide.

It's hard to say how World War II era poets like Howard and John will fare in history. One or two of their poems show up in anthologies. I think Howard's poems about the war should be remembered. along with several of his others. The work of that era has a stern formalism, an academic dryness, the quality of being locked behind museum glass. Some of the subject matter, such as with the poem on walking the dog, can be incidental and inconsequential. Still, I value those poets, especially when they strive to break away toward more freedom of technique and subject.

After my second summer at Sewanee, I heard that Howard had passed away in St. Louis. Now, 20 years later, his memory is evoked by a T-shirt. I hope it survives one more washing. This time, I'll leave it in the drawer forever.

Tom Yuill: "I Want the Poem to Be Itself, to Be a Realized, Complete Work of Art"

      I met Tom Yuill for all of two minutes last summer in the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. In our brief chat before he hurried off to catch a plane, I learned that he was a poet, so I quickly asked if he would participate in a Southern Bookman interview. He heartily agreed before rushing off into the bright morning. I repaired to nearby Harvard Square with Tom's collection "Medicine Show" (University of Chicago Press) and his e-mail address. I spent an hour or so seated on a bench as students and teachers ambled by, finding myself entranced and excited by Tom's poems, which combined formal elements with daring flights of expression. Elizabethan and modernist echoes blended with sounds of the blues, Texas honky tonks and cowboy songs. Themes of rebellion, family loyalty, allegiance to the past and tradition, and the desire for escape and freedom meshed in artistic counterpoint. Since then, we have developed a warm friendship via e-mail. Now in mid-autumn, here are Tom's responses to my questions. Tom teaches at Boston University, where he studied with one of the first subjects of the Southern Bookman interviews, Rosanna Warren. 

Your fine book “Medicine Show” contains a multitude of characters, moods, voices and settings. A key is the poem “Several Histories” (freely after Hikmet) in which you say “into being came three worlds/ Where I still live.” The collection explores these several histories, and perhaps more than three worlds. How do these histories and worlds correspond and interact?

I guess the whole thing together is a strange panegyric. The arc of the book, its plot, is one way the different “worlds” interact. The tongue in cheek swagger, artifice and naivete of, say, “Ode to the Wind” give this sass-laden paean to free will the right tenor for the first section, in which the poet is not yet cognizant of the depth of his confusion. The adaptations of Villon in particular but also of Corbiere and Catullus appear like consoling blues tunes, Hank Williams songs or — to me at least — hymns. They echo present pain and thereby give solace and bring needed empathetic companionship. By the time we get to “Several Histories” the poet character of the book is more attuned to his devastations and to his joys. Hikmet’s wonderful poem is often translated as “Two Loves,” so mine is really an occasion in a little lyric spell to receive the gift of Hikmet’s kind genius and to hear it as I do hear it, through the noise and sweetness of my own disordered memories — “worlds” you might call them — some fairly real, most of them largely imagined.

 I loved the references to the Rolling Stones. How does their music influence you as a poet?

The Rolling Stones are, for me, stunning artists. I was never the kind of person who wanted to rush down to their hotel after the show to try to hang out or the deluded sort who thought he should try heroin because Keith did it. I don’t care what they look like or who else likes their records, whether the new record gets good reviews. It would be my pleasure to meet them I suppose, particularly Charlie, but their music and performances have always been more than enough of a gift, a staggering gift of creative work for anyone who is interested. Keith, Mick and Charlie do something with rhythm that is transformative. Transformative of received influences, transformative to the central nervous systems of people listening, transformative in the highest traditions of art and on a basic physical level. Listen to Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” then listen to “Beast of Burden,” for instance. I have no idea if the Stones were trying to do anything in particular there, but the relatively disciplined, infectious cadences of “Havana Moon” seem to me transformed into the peculiarly rollicking, infectious cadences of “Beast of Burden.” Dad taught me what iambic pentameter is so long ago I literally cannot remember learning it. I only remember, at a very young age, knowing what it is.

Where both deliberate the love is slight.

I just knew whenever some teacher asked me about it, what was in blank verse and what was not. So when I write something like, 

The air is hot, it whispers, it has lips.

It whispers like good news…the beer is cold…

I know, having internalized blank verse a long time ago, I have internalized something else as well. perhaps listening to the Stones for 15 years prior to that helped me find my own peculiarities within that pentameter. Not quite iambic, but, for me, for that poem, it’s on the money.   

 
 
You had three different poems titled “Medicine Show.” The way you paced them through the book gave the impression of a wagon traveling to different places. Do you see them as a sequence, perhaps as one poem?

I don’t see them as a sequence exactly, but I certainly see them as connected. I like the impression you got, Louis — thank you. The poem just needed three versions, and the book needed each of them at different points. Should one see the book as a quest upward, or downward perhaps, up Parnassus or down Mount Jackass, the three versions might simply reflect the poet’s gradual internal and external progress. After all it’s easy enough to feel discouraged not being able to improve society, even one’s own corner of it, and most concerned Americans might feel hopeless enough by now about a war one knows about mainly from seeing it on television, a hideously remote reality for something that serious. It’s not that hard to know burying one’s self in a pile of middle class burdens will be, for some, a realistic way to raise children, for others a form of self-burial. The last of the three, of course, is a healing lyric. Your parents are not perfect, and they love you. How much trading pain for pain might be avoided with such revelations? But the other versions have to be there, too.

 I loved the evocations of your Texas childhood and family, particularly the son’s relationship with the father, with elements of rebellion and conflict as well as love. How did you give these personal narratives such universal power?

Such personal narratives had universal power a long time before I came along. Which is not to say I do not deeply appreciate your observation — such poems are, after all, great opportunities for falling on your face as a poet. Texas will always be profound to me. The places we live when we are little often stay uniquely meaningful. I always think Dad, his Dad whom we all knew as Kewpie, and Mom’s Dad, Granddaddy Bell, are the three greatest guys I’ll ever know. By the late '90s it became the norm to treat your father as ridiculous, like Homer Simpson, but rebellion used to be quite normal — beyond whatever Freud articulated. The best popular music of the 1960s is so incredibly good that a lot of cultural moments which were only really valid then became shadow versions of themselves for kids in the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s. Everyone was supposed to try to have their version of what they thought the 60s were. Kids my age wanted electric guitars for Christmas so they could play Van Halen covers. I always preferred the Stones and the Beatles, and I was captain of the swim team in high school and recruited to swim on a Division 1 team in college, so I was immune to some of that influence, but not all of it. For a while I suppose I thought you were supposed to be mad at your father. He was very patient with it for the most part, and eventually I decided rebelling doesn’t have much to do with originality. We returned to the norm then, which for us meant we were very close.   

Your freely rendered translations of poets like Villon, Hikmet and Corbiere reminded me of similar work by Robert Lowell. Is Lowell a strong influence for you?

Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” is very important to me. After my first day in graduate school at BU I took Derek Walcott’s advice and went to the Grolier to buy it. Also at Derek’s suggestion I started rewriting Rimbaud and Baudelaire poems in free verse. Then I had the profound good luck to work with Rosanna Warren, both in the graduate poetry seminar and in her translation seminar. There I studied Dryden’s essay in earnest, along with the usual classic texts from Benjamin, etc. I still find Mark Strand’s Grade A poem “Translation” perhaps the easiest to sympathize with on this vast subject. I am not an expert in foreign languages but a poet who feels uncommonly indebted to older poets, many of whom wrote in languages other than English. My adaptations and imitations should not be understood too differently from, say, the Rolling Stones’ electric cover version of Robert Johnson’s acoustic “Stop Breaking Down Blues.”

The poem “Dallas Skinheads” stood out, combining the diverse elements that make the entire book so captivating. How did you see such disreputable characters as sympathetic, almost heroic?

The poem’s rhyme scheme is an abbc sort of pattern so it has a sonic fabric holding its various elements together. And it is in couplets, so they perhaps whisper the idea of heroics. And of course there is the organization of the poem, which for me is like the organization of images on a rose medallion vase or the weaving together of elements in one of Robert Pinsky’s poems. I never set out to try to write poems like Robert’s, but BU was the only graduate program to which I applied specifically because I knew I had to work with him. He proved to be every bit the mentor I needed as a younger poet, and more. Some influence is bound to show, I suppose. AS I say in the notes, I owe Robert a special debt of gratitude.

I should point out the young skinhead is not a neo-nazi but a social misfit trying to find a way to affirm himself. There is something at least poignant, if not necessarily heroic, in the struggle to affirm one’s self in the midst of confusion. The older lyric from “Streets of Laredo” is often thought of as a light little cowboy song. The Smothers Brothers did a pastiche of it. But it’s about a young man who’s gotten himself fatally wounded for no particularly good reason, and is trying to ask before he dies for some modest funeral. The Mom character in the poem experiences the sudden death of her own mother and begins to slowly destroy herself. The Americans in the Midwest, whose children may be rebelling for reasons unclear to them, may themselves be voting for a president who wants to make possible a winnable nuclear war. Unconscious, destructive impulses are not the private property of the young, even if the young may be the most obvious sufferers of such impulses. And of course, it is a poem about influences. We have free will, perhaps. The question is, do we use it? 

Like Lowell, you have a gift for memorable, striking individual lines that click into the mind like gold coins. Do you work and rework these lines, or are they products of sudden inspiration?

Well, thank you for a great compliment. I compose all the time, always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket or by the bed, so sudden inspiration must certainly be part of what I’m doing. But I work on the lines, the stanzas, the poems, all of it, over and over. I have spent years listening to a poem over and over, trying to make sure the rhythms I have on the page are right for the poem itself. I take great swaths of lines, pull three of seven out and fuse them with one or twelve more I wrote at another time. No rules, really, except that I want to the poem to be itself, to be a realized, complete work of art. And, sure, for me part of that is giving it the right lines, not the flashiest lines, not the strangest lines, not the most formally strict lines, none of that. If the lines are memorable I give credit to the poem, that is to say, I said it aloud so many times it must have wrung from itself whatever wasn’t ringing true. As Shakespeare, Lowell, Sidney, Villon, Fulke Greville and Frost teach us, what rings true artistically IS often memorable. Thank you for the kind compliment to those poems.

 What direction is your work taking these days?

My next book of poetry is called “American Bull Terrier.” It has begun as a book about force, Being as Force I guess, in the Heideggerian sense. But it will certainly go from there to become more complex. Dad is one of the heroes of "Medicine Show" — Mom and Dad. Mom is an ethereal presence reappearing throughout, and Dad rests in a big poem right before the last section. So far Kewpie (my father’s father) appears to be one hero of the new one. And my wife, of course, remains a Muse and a beacon. I never worry about formal strategy or such things. I learn about the form of the book as I write, revise and organize the poems.  

 

 

 

A Decline in Passion for Books?

Slate media critic Jack Shafer recently lamented that he no longer reveres books as he once did. Shafer said that he once collected books, stacked them in his home, fondled their covers,and honored authors and books' transcendent cultural value. Now, he says, he rarely if ever even attends a book party.

Book party invitations seem a superficial manifestation of a love for books, but I know what Shafer means. I also don't experience the passion for books I once had. Once the publication of "big" fall books excited me, but no more. I still go to bookstores and libraries, yet it more and more feels out of habit than enthusiasm.

My home is loaded with books from years of collecting. A few old favorites I take down to re-read, such as my old graybound "Norton Anthology of English Literare, Vols. I and II," from my college days. I like being surrounded by books, as Anthony Powell's title said, books do furnish a room. Yet, I do not purchase as many books today as I once did. Fewer and fewer books do I find interesting enough to take home on impulse.

Still, I maintain a stack of books beside my living room chair. Although I detect a falloff in my passion for books, I still feel satisfaction at discovering an interesting book at the library. Poetry books especially still excite me. Perhaps I'm just not taken by those books heralded by arbiters like the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Books still matter to me, but as Shafer reflects, their hold is weakening. I am undoubtedly affected my the general drop in books' importance, along with that of newspapers, magazines and literary journals.

Shafer made an interesting comment about the rise of the Kindle and the e-book, that perhaps they would put the emphasis on reading, not the book. I once considered books, with their cover designs, photographs and artwork, as works of art. With the Kindle, they are more and more vehicles of information and entertainment, not artifacts. Shafer could be right that such devices indicate the primacy of content, the irrelevance of form.

Overrated Writers Have Always Been With Us

Anis Shivani, identified as a novelist and poet, recently re-enacted the old literary parlor game by identifying for the Huffington Post the 15 most overrated writers in America. Shivani scored a few hits and witty barbed phrases in rounding up his collection of the usual suspects who frequently draw fire from literary wanna-bes such as Shivani. So, Shivani follows the recent literary ax-swinging carried out by Dale Peck and others.

At least Shivani's piece  had me thinking about the present-day literary culture. Like many writers, Shivani apparently dreams of a golden age of literature, when America was blessed with a multitude of critics, novelists and poets of incredble power, insight and originality. In this view, the country once had a broad, discriminating literary public, able to discern the really great writers from the second rate. As Randall Jarrell (well, we once did have some able critics -- sorry, Mr. Shivani, you don't quite reach Jarrell levels) pointed out, such nostalgia for a golden literary age is misplaced.

The writers Shivani singles out - William T Vollman, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Helen Vendler, Antonya Nelson, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, Michael Cunningham, Billy Collins and New York Times Michiko Kakutani, definitely have shortcomings. Sivani cites examples of bad writing from each of them. They might be supremely overrated, but the same was said of John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope. Back in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, similar games were carried out, as writers lampooned each other as overrated and pompous. Remember that jealous fellow who cast a dart or two at Shakespeare, and Shakespeare doing the samew with Christopher Marlowe?

While many of Shivani's comments were justified, and while I've been exasperated and dismayed by each of the writers Shivani cites, I find myself strangely moved to rise in their defense. Each of them must have qualities that caused them to be "overrated." And who, or what institutions, overrates them? Each of them has met muster with publishers, reviewers, magazine editors, universities and readers. So, are the standards of Harvard, which hired Vendler and Graham, wrong? Are editors who print Amy Tan's books total fools? Are readers who love Mary Oliver's nature poems misguided?

While I find Mary Oliver's work a step above greeting card verse, and agree that Jorie Graham's poetry has sailed off into pretension and abstraction, each of them has audiences that find value and meaning in whatever they write. Some of Nelson's stories in The New Yorker are among the few in that once great literary magazine that I've been able to read beyond one or two paragraphs. (The New Yorker's collection of writers under 40 shows that a new overrated generation is taking hold. Yay!) I've like poems by Ashberry, although I consider him the worst of the New York School, and Gluck. And I agree with Shivani that Collins is a "one-trick pony," is it really so awful to entertain people with poetry on the Garrison Keillor show? While Vendler can be awful, I've found much of value in her examination of Keats' odes and other books. New York Times critic Kakutani is as prone to literary cliche and pompous writing as Shivani says, but still I read her work for whatever insights she might muster.

Actually, the country appears to have more of a vibrant and varied literary culture than Silvani supposes. He cites Helen Vender as if she were the only poetry critic in America, but we have William Logan, Dan Chiasson, Adam Kirsch (whom Shivani cites) and many others in literary journals.We now have countless literary sites on the Internet. The country is covered with book clubs and the like. Literary reviews might be declining in newspapers, but many sources of criticism remain. While the bad writing Shavani comes up with is appalling, the same exercise could be carried out for any number of writers, from William Faulkner to Shakespeare.

Still, Shivani, and other writers who have done this kind of hit job in the past, provide a service of making readers more discerning about writers frequently lauded. As Dylan Thomas pointed out, simple visceral pleasure is a worthy reponse to literature, but pleasure can blind us to a writer's shortcomings. Shivani and others make us aware of the neccesity of a second or third reading, of evaluating sentences and paragtaphs closely. But must me? Can't we just enjoy a brief laugh at a Collins poem? Aren't we all quickly aware of a clunky line by Jorie Graham?

History is the final arbiter, of course. If a writer like Shivani would have been alive in the 19th century, he might have seen Tennyson, Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant as overrated, and each of their reputations has declined in varying dgreees over the years. Few if anyone even knew Emily Dickinson or even Walt Whitman at the time. Melville was considered a failure, and who in 1824 could have preducted that Keats would be considered a more important poet than Lord Byron?

Liteary reputations have always been overrated or underrated. Critics, even the best of them, have often been wrong in their judgments. As Jarrell pointed out, we probably never had a broad literary audience waiting breatlhlessly for the next poem by T.S. Eliot or the next novel by James Joyce. The popular, the second-rate, the overrated, has always held the upper hand.  

Farewell, Frank Kermode

Sir Frank Kermode was one of those special writers whose work I revered. His name quickened my pulse when I saw one of his articles listed in the table of contents of the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books or other publications for which he wrote. Through the years, he was one of my literary masters.

While his pieces on contemporary writers like Philip Roth or Don DeLillo were excellent, I loved his work on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and other classic English writers . His writing could be dry, with subtle ironies I struggled to "get."  At his best, his writing displayed the grace, wit and erudition of the great English critics, in a line going back to William Empson, T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Samuel Johnson. 

More and more, I mark the deaths of writers and artists who almost became friends over the years as I encountered their work. Just before reading of Kermode's death at the age of 90, I'd read a posthumous memoir by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books about Judt's formative years at King's College, Cambridge. Kermode was a key figure of Judt's years at King's College. Like Judt, Kermode eventually left King's, one signal of a long, slow decline that Judt registers with sadness. Kermode came to the United States to teach at Harvard.

Now, I won't have that excitement of discovery at the fresh appearance of one of Kermode's essays. However, he leaves behind an impressive body of work in books on Shakespeare and other writers and his wornderful memoir "Not Entitled" which gives a vivid recounting of his rise from a humble, non-literary background on the Isle of Man.

One of his celebrated books was "The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction," and his death truly marks the final stages of a long era. He represented the culture of the book and printing, the spread of a literate public that emerged from  Gutenberg's printing press. With the Internet and e-publishing, that era appears in eclipse, although it stubbornly hangs on. No matter which form it may take, writing like Kermode's will remain necessary to human awareness.