Southern Bookman

Farewell David Bottoms, longtime Georgia poet laureate

David Bottoms' poems captured Georgia's soul.

Georgia's poet laureate from 2000-2012, Bottoms found beauty in the state's verdant natural landscape as well as the discarded detrius of its working class.

Like Georgia poet James Dickey, Bottoms loved old-time music, abandoned cars, rural landscapes and the rhythms of working language.

Bottoms, a longtime professor at Georgia State University and founding editor of the Five Points literary journal, died Friday at age 73 of progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurogenerative disease similar to ALS, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He had been battling the progressive disease since 2018, longtime Atlanta arts writer Phil Kloer said in his obituary about Bottoms written for the newspaper.

Noted Southern novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren in 1979 selected Bottoms' first collection "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump" for the prestigious Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Warren, author of the famed novel "All the King's Men" and a major poet and critic, called Bottoms "a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is temperamentally a realist. In his vision, the actual world is not transformed but illuminated."

Kloer in his warm and authoritative obituary noted Warren's praise of Bottoms, along with an appreciation by Josh Russell, the director of creative writing at Georgia State.

In announcing Bottoms' death, Russell said "David was at turns funny, cranky and philosophical. That range is in his poetry, as is his amusement and bemusement and wonder with the world."

Bottoms was born in Canton. Ga., in 1949, and graduated from Mercer University. He received a doctorate from Florida State University in 1979. He published 11 poetry collections, including "In a U-Haul North of Damascus" and "Vagrant Grace," along with the novels "Eastern Weekend" and"Any Cold Jordan."

I remember Bottoms fondly for the generous and learned interview he gave me for an AJC feature story I wrote on the 19th century Southern poet Sidney Lanier, a Macon native remembered for poems like "The Song of the Chattahoochee" and "The Marshes of Glynn."

Bottoms cordially analyzed Lanier's work, and how Lanier's poetic reputation had declined with the advent of modernism in the early 20th century. High schools across the South were named for Lanier, but his work is little read today, although his musical language deserves renewed attention.

I also remember a stimulating lecture on poetic craft that Bottoms delivered at an Atlanta writers' conference. Unlike many well-known poets, Bottoms displayed warmth and generosity in encouraging his audience of aspiring writers. Bottoms pointed out that poetry unlike philosophy lives on concrete images from the natural world.

My favorite memory of Bottoms came from a reading by the esteemed poet James Merrill at the Callanwolde Arts Center in DeKalb County. Major American poets once appeared at Callanwolde's annual poetry weekend, a wonderful event sadly canceled before the 1996 Olympics.

After Merrill delivered his magical reading, he warmly greeted David. I saw them standing together in a soft light, two giants of American poetry.

 

Remembering John Keats, on 202nd anniversary of his death

I first fell in love with Keats when I was an English major at Louisiana State University.

Each week, I walked up the steps at O.K. Allen Hall, named for Huey Long's main crony, to go to the office of a professor whose name I've sadly forgotten. She spoke with a proper and forbidding British accent, and always wore a formal dress. I learned over that semester in southern Louisiana's gorgeous springtime of her kindness and humor.

I took a class in Keats' work from the lovely lady, in which I was the only student. Each week, we discussed Keats' poems and letters. She told anecdotes about the young poet, as if she'd been a member of his circle in early 19th century London.

On the 202nd anniversary of Keats' death in a small apartment overlooking Rome's Spanish Steps, I look back on that young student. I was not quite 25, the age at which Keats died of tuberculosis, believing himself forgotten.

As with Melville, Keats was rediscovered posthumously. Now, he's the best remembered Romantic poet, subject of a continuing stream of books.

Over the years, I visited the place where Keats died in the care of painter Joseph Severn, and his grave at Rome's Protestant Cemetery with its bitter epitaph, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." I've also gone to the home in London where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, wrote his great odes and walked along the Hampstead Heath.

Soon to turn 72, I've never stopped reading his poems.

 

Poet laureate Ada Limón's Emory reading muted by inadequate sound system

U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón gave a compelling reading Feb. 11 at Emory University.

Unfortunately, many of the crowd packing Glenn Memorial Auditorium on a rainy Saturday afternoon could barely hear her poems. A faulty sound system made key phrases inaudible.

Limón, a native of Sonoma, Calif. and the first Latina poet laureate, presented work from her recent collections "The Carrying" and "The Hurting Kind" with warmth and gentle humor.

She read in an easy, conversational tone, avoiding overly dramatic vocal effects. Alas, her lines often faded away, diluting their dramatic power.

The appearance for the Raymond Danowski Poetry Reading Series was sponsored by Emory's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

What could have been a triumphant event for Atlanta's literary community was deflated by the technical difficulties.

The audience deserved to hear Limón's voice in full register.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Charles Simic and Naomi Replansky, imimitable American poets

Charles Simic and Naomi Replansky wrote poems in which every day objects opened connections to monumental historic tragedies.

Simic, the Serbian-born poet who learned English in a Chicago-area high school as a 15-year-old, translated European surrealism into the American idiom.

The former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner died Monday at age 84 at an assisted care facility in Dover, N.H., from complications of dementia.

Like Simic, Replansky captured the startling images of foreign poetry in American language. Replansky, who died at age 104 Saturday at her home in Manhattan, echoed the surrealism of Latin American writing, a difficult feat, as admirer Philip Levine noted.

Replansky also went against the grain of American poetry by her use of rhyme and meter. In an excellent obituary examining Replansky's undervalued career, New York Times writer Margalit Fox effectively illustrated Replansky's technique by giving examples of her poetry.

In one poem cited by Fox, Replansky recalls eating with a spoon when she heard about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The poem contrasts her personal anguish with the immense suffering of the Japanese city at the end of World War II.

Unlike the prolific Simic, Replansky published only three collections of her work. She also held a variety of jobs, including a stint as a "stewardess" on a ship making an ocean voyage.

Fox says the Bronx native, who lived for a number of years in California before returning to New York City, was discouraged by a negative review from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The beat icon objected to her use of  rhyme. Fox's examples of Replansky's work show that he was woefully misguided and that she revitalized traditional techniques.

In his outstanding New York Times obituary of Simic, the newspaper's literary critic Dwight Garner traced the poet and critic's rise from World War II-ravaged Yugoslavia to a place at the center of American literary culture. The U.S. poet laureate from 2007 to 2008, Simic won the Pulitizer Prize in 1990 for his prose-poem collection, "The World Doesn't End."

As Garner noted, Simic remained haunted by his childhood in war-torn Serbia, where he witnessed first-hand Nazi atrocities. In poems beginning with every-day experiences, he shifted to recollections of his harrowing past, mixing horror with black humor. In later life, Simic more frequently wrote about the pleasures of food, love and daily experiences.

Like William Carlos Williams, Simic wrote deceptively simple poems that seemed easy to imitate. Yet he was unique in his droll use of imagery in which common objects gained magical qualities.

Simic's death immediately followed that of another major American writer, poet and novelist Russell Banks. Noted editor and poet Daniel Halpern confirmed both men's deaths.

The passing of writers like Simic, Replansky and Banks brings sorrow mixed with gratitude that their work endures.

 

 

 

Robert Pinsky poem "Soul Making" finds the joy in Keats' "vale of soul making"

Robert Pinsky's poem "Soul Making" in the current New Yorker engages with Keats' conception of human life as a "vale of soul-making."

In one of his brilliant letters, Keats sees life as a mansion with several rooms through which humans progress, developing consciousness. After the joy of youth comes an awareness of mortality, and a final room shrouded in darkness. In contrast to Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood," Keats rejects the solace of eternal life.

Pinsky in contrast envisions the joy of soul making, dismissing Keats' dark view of human existence. Responding to Keats with several references to his poems "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn," Pinksy sees human soul making as heroic, reflected in the wonders of history and scientific discovery.

Drawing parallels between the galaxies photographed by the Webb telescope and the microscopic animals that live within us, the poet compares his wonder at the natural world to the pleasure experienced by an infant when his mother feeds him apples and apricots from a baby-food jar.

With a reference to Egypt, Pinsky links that small, private human ritual to the unfolding of history. The Egypt reference recalls Keats' allusion in "Ode to a Nightingale" to Ruth amid the alien corn. In the biblical story, Ruth, a Moabite woman, chooses to live in Israel, enemy territory. As a result, she becomes King David's grandmother.

Pinksy in the poem shows the life-affirming aspects of Keats' "vale of soul-making," the belief in beauty and human creativity that Keats affirmed in his life and poetry.

Soul Making

By Robert Pinsky

Galactic broth visible light-years away
Brews the first suns. Familial, I feel
I know these lights. I see their pre-biotic
Geometries of purpose the way I impose

Human, nearly literary intentions
Onto the microscopic animals, flexing
Bizarre mandibles, that patrol my eyelids
And guts. Brothers and sisters electronically

Revealed, arcane mute dynasties of being:
Darkling I too perform the turns and bits
Of my assigned proportions. Feigning
Rapt comprehension, I know you the way

An infant pretends amazement each time
The mother with a spoon tip searching
Under the jar’s rim finds more and yet
More of the strained Apricots and Apples:

Infant, the sunflower turns toward her, deep
Egypt of shared attachment and concealment,
Tangy preserved sweetness forging in turn
The courtly generation of—call it a soul.

Robert Lowell's prose collection "Memoirs" shows poetic gifts

I once made a pilgrimage to 239 Marlborough St. in Boston, where Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick lived for several years.

The home, now part of a Catholic school, was blocks away from where Lowell spent his childhood and adolscence.

As Lowell says in a recently discovered 160-page autobiographical essay written when he was a patient at a New York City mental hospital after one of his first bipolar attacks, he like Henry Adams was born under the shadow of the Massachusetts state house.

The essay about his Boston childhood has been published in a new collection of Lowell's prose, titled "Memoirs."  A descendant of old Boston families in  decline by his generation, Lowell writes with acute historical awareness.

His obsessive, hyper-observant study of his parents' fraught marriage and his warm memories of his maternal grandfather, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer, revisit the same milieu as the prose memoir "91 Revere St." and autobiographical poems in his collection "Life Studies."

"Memoirs" concludes with Lowell's recollections and appreciations of contemporaries Randall Jarrell, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ford Madox Ford, John Berryman, Hannah Arendt, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Glaringly absent is any mention of his close friend and now more acclaimed poet, Elizabeth Bishop.

In an entertaining piece, Lowell recounts the familiar story of his sojourn at the home of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon in Clarksville, Tenn. Tate told the hulking young Lowell when he unexpectedly showed up that the only way he could stay would be if he put up a tent. Taking Tate literally, Lowell bought a pup tent at a local Sears & Roebuck store, and lived in it on Tate's front lawn. Later, Ford arrived at the nutty household.

Lowell's views on his contemporaries' poetry show an original critical intelligence. He might have achieved the renown Jarrell and T.S. Eliot gained as critics had he devoted more attention to analyzing other's work.

A standout is his warm appreciation of Jarrell following the critic, poet and novelist's death, possibly by suicide. Jarrell's personality comes alive in Lowell's portrait.

Lowell balances his praise of his contemporaries' work with acid-tinged assessments of their weaknesses. He''s particularly wounding in his criticism of Berryman, Sexton and Plath.

The section gives a group portrait of a generation whose poetic brilliance was tinged with mental illness, alcoholism and suicide.

Lowell's poetic reputation has declined in recent years, and he's been pilloried for his disgraceful treatment of  his wives Jean Stafford, Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwood. While Lowell was too often monstrous, he possessed a generosity and a gift for friendship. 

While "Memoirs" covers familiar ground, Lowell's voice is fresh and vital. But new readers seeking to enter Lowell's world should turn to the poems.

 

 

 

 

 

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Farewell, Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker art critic

Peter Schjeldahl like other great critics brought an excitement to his writing, which stood on its own outside his critical judgments.

The New Yorker arts critic died Monday at age 80 at his home in upstate New York after a long battle with lung cancer.

A college dropout from Minnesota who came to New York City as a young poet enthralled with Frank O'Hara and other New York School writers and artists, Schjeldahl turned to arts criticism, captivated by New York City's electric arts scene. After several years with the Village Voice, he joined the New Yorker in 1998.

His astute, impressionistic essays displayed the poetic flair of his youth, exciting his readers whether the subject was an old master's exhibit at the Met or a young artist's show at a downtown gallery.

His daughter, Ada Calhoun, gave a memorable portrait of her father in her memoir, "Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father and Me." The book tells how she discovered tapes of interviews Schjeldahl conducted with New York School artists and writers for a never completed biography of O'Hara. Calhoun recalls Schjeldahl as a free-spirited father who let her wander without supervision in the dangerous New York City of the 1960s.

Schjeldahl never lost his sense of wonder at great art. He educated his readers in aesthetic appreciation, but his writing would have sparked fire with any subject.

 

 

All of those books in a lifetime of reading

Whenever I finish a book, I wish I knew how many I've completed in a lifetime of reading.

A few books stand out: Kerry the Firedog, another early picture book about a truck delivering coal, Alice and Jerry's adventures revealing the wonders of language in my first grade class taught by Miss Coates, whom I still remember. The Golden Books, with their distinctive gold-leaf binding, opened a world of enchantment.

My youth was filled with the Hardy Boys, Chip Hilton and the Western novels of Zane Gray. Our mother took us for summertime visits to the air-conditioned bookmobile, where I checked out stacks of baseball, football, golf and boxing histories.

I also loved a series of biographies about famous Americans in their youths, such as "Ernie Pyle, Young Reporter." My favorites were lives of Lou Gehrig, Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.

Carlos Baker's early biography of Ernest Hemingway stands out as one of the first "serious" books I finished. From there, I discovered Hemingway's novels and short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night," Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" and James Joyce's "The Dead." I also fell under the spell of J.D. Salinger's short stories and Glass Family saga and James Joyce's "The Dead."

William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and short stories were a major touchstone of my reading life.

From my college years, I treasure the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2, to which I often return. For years, I consulted my college Webster's dictionary, although it lacked a few contemporary words. In recent years, I've gone to the Internet for definitions.

In college, I began a lifetime passion for the poems of Keats, Eliot and Donne and the poems and plays of Shakespeare.

Sometimes the titles on my bookshelves look like tombstones. I wonder why I'd ever acquired some of my more esoteric titles. Reading often seems futile these days. But it's as essential to me as breathing.

I'll keep reading until I finish my final book.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Chattahoochee Review

The Chattahoochee Review began the careers of many acclaimed authors.

Founded by Lamar York in 1989 at what was then Chattahoochee Community College, now Georgia Perimeter College, the small but vital journal published early work by an impressive list of writers. The journal's short stories, poems, author interviews, book reviews and art set a high standard.

AJC book columnist Suzanne Van Atten reported Tuesday that the review has stopped publication, a victim of the covid pandemic and financial setbacks.

Countering that sad news, Van Atten announced that the Townsend Prize for the best fiction book published in Georgia will again be awarded after a two-year hiatus. The Atlanta Writers Club, which took over the prize from the Chattahoochee Review, will announce the winner in April.

On a personal note, I published two pieces in the Chattahoochee Review a number of years ago, a book review and a critical essay on the work of the late Atlanta poet Turner Cassity, who served for many years as Emory University's chief librarian.

The Chattahoochee Review was a literary beacon. Its demise is a loss for Atlanta as a literary center.

Ralph Fiennes to read T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" on 100th anniversary of poem's publication

T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" reaches its full power when read aloud.

An actor reciting the modernist masterpiece brings out its different voices, rising into a mesmerizing and overwhelming drama echoing Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. Jeremy Irons' performance of "The Wasteland" on a recording he made of Eliot's poems reveals the aural majesty of Eliot's words.

Ralph Fiennes will read "The Wasteland" Dec. 5 at New York City's 92nd Street Y, marking the 100th anniversary of the poem's publication. Eliot read the poem on the same stage on Dec. 5, 1950. The 92nd Street Y, now called 92NY in a bit of marketing excess, announced the reading as part of its fall season.

Like James Joyce's "Ulysses" published in 1922, "The Wasteland" describes a lost European civilization devastated by World War I. The narrator wanders like a shell-shocked soldier, or ghost, through a ravaged London. Other voices recall a vanished culture, defined by childhood joy. For all of its despair, the poem has a vitality of working class characters, jazz motifs and black humor.

Ezra Pound, also a friend of Joyce, edited Eliot's poem. Later, Pound was imprisoned as a traitor for supporting Hitler's war effort. Now Pound's hate-obsessed agenda spreads across the globe.

"The Wasteland's" relevance is undiminished as the world's climate collapses and political violence rises.

A national broadcast of Fiennes' reading would be a light shining in the darkness.