On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, David Kennedy wrote:

> and now, as ric said earlier, we should all move on...
> 
> i could kick things off by
> saying that i am reading, for the first time, theodore enslin via an old
> (1966) special issue of coyote's journal 

Happy to endorse this programme of _liking_ things. Here's a plug for the
new Enslin selected, work of a man who's been a _positive_ presence in
poetry for so long:

THEN, AND NOW: SELECTED POEMS 1943-1993

                                       THEODORE ENSLIN

                                       Mark Nowak, Editor


 I've often said that I like to be considered as a composer who happens to
use words instead of notes.
-Theodore Enslin
 
With the publication of Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993, it
is possible for the poetry reading public to get an overall sense of
Theodore Enslin's oeuvre for the first time. Beginning with his first
book,
The Work Proposed, published in 1958 by Cid Corman's legendary Origin
Press, Enslin's previous books have been published in small editions by
small presses. Most of these 80 or so titles are out-of-print, including
the only other selected to appear, Black Sparrow's The Median Flow. (This
book, which came out in 1975, only covered the period up to 1973, and was
less than 200 pages.) National Poetry Foundation's 432-page, Then, and
Now:
Selected Poems 1943-1993, is the most comprehensive edition of Enslin's
poetry ever published.
Theodore Vernon Enslin was born on March 25, 1925, in Chester,
Pennsylvania. His father was a professor and well-known biblical scholar;
his mother was a Latin scholar. His gifts as a writer were recognized
early
on by his musical composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger, with whom he
studied in Cambridge, MA. "You should write," she told him, which he took,
he has said, "as a affirmation of something that I already knew." He moved
to Temple, Maine in 1960; then with his wife Alison, in the 1970s, he
settled in the small coastal village of Milbridge. He has supported
himself
through readings, a NEA fellowship, odd jobs, and the manufacture of
homemade walking sticks (one of which is pictured, with Enslin, on the
book's cover).
Though the rubric, "American master," has been overused, applying
it to Theodore Enslin is justified. His relative obscurity, compared to
other poets, does not reflect poorly upon his accomplishments. To the
contrary: that he is underread has to do with what's fashionable and how
Enslin has chosen to isolate himself. He has always been reticent to
discuss or promote his work, he has no academic affiliation, and he lives
in the easternmost county in the United States, Maine's Washington County.
His marginality, if one thinks of it that way, is actually one of his
strengths as a writer and observer. He embodies Thoreau's dictim, "What I
require of any man is that he give me a true and honest account of his
life."
Though it would be pointless to dismiss the role that the Maine
landscape has played in the composition and subject matter of his poems,
Enslin refuses to label himself as a regional writer. He has commented,
"If
I had lived in a completely different place, completely different milieu,
I'm convinced that I would have tried to have used everything that was
there in exactly the same way. And sometimes that upsets people."
Explaining (by not-explaining) his own work, Enslin adds, "It is
always very tempting to say more than one should concerning those things
that are dearest and closest. I try to avoid that, and simply hope that
the
record is in the work itself....For me, poetry and music are one art. The
greatest compliment that anyone could pay me: 'He was a composer who
happened to use words.'"
In lieu of an editor's preface, Mark Nowak has included, as an
afterword, an August, 1997 interview with Enslin. "The idea of such a
dialogic afterword," notes Nowak, who is Associate Professor of English at
the College of St. Catherine-Minneapolis, and editor of Xcp:
Cross-Cultural
Poetics Press, "owes its genesis to both Enslin's resistance to the usual
critical approach to his work, and the editor's interest in dialogic
approaches to history."
 
Darkness?
That was only
a pocket in my shirt.
-Theodore Enslin

 
1999 432 pages Cloth $34.95 (0-943373-53-0)

Paper $19.95 ( 0-943373-54-9)

RC
 




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