This is excellent news. Congrats Henry. I've admired Island Road
electronically for ages, it'll be a real pleasure to get my mitts on it and
the other three vols.
best
Randolph Healy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 2:40 PM
Subject: publ. announcement: a long poem
> A long poem I have been working on for several years is now available,
> complete in four books. The title is Forth of July. The first book,
> Stubborn Grew, was published early this year by Spuyten Duyvil Press -
> http://spuytenduyvil.net/stubborn.html.
> The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th books, titled respectively The Grassblade Light,
> July, and Island Road, are available from Xlibris. If you go to their
> bookstore, at http://www.xlibris.com/html/bookstore/html, and do an
> author search, you will find all three. Island Road, the final vol.,
> actually includes two separate sections: "Island Road", a sonnet
> sequence originally published electronically in Mudlark, and
> "Blackstone's Day-Book", the brief concluding book of Forth of July.
>
> *
>
> Forth of July - a brief abstract
>
> I described this project a little in an interview with Kent Johnson
> in Jacket #10. After almost ten years of false starts & unsatisfactory
> finishes in my attempts to tackle a long poem, a sort of conjunction of
> approaches took place. I had wanted to model what I was doing more on
> Hart Crane's _Bridge_ than on any of the other available exemplars, for
> a number of reasons - perhaps the primary one being that it might allow
> me to shed a different sort of light on the historical/aesthetic presence
> of the American long poems which came after his. But the way to do this
> didn't appear until I modelled my approach much more immediately and
> directly on another set of works - Mandelstam's Voronezh poems. A new
> reading of these brief lyrics suddenly allowed me to focus a number of
> different themes and directions.
> The result was a more extended labor than I had expected. Each of the
> 3 books which followed Stubborn Grew came as both a surprise and what
seemed
> to be a formal necessity. If I could summarize the "plot" in one
sentence,
> it would be: Forth of July is a quest in pursuit of a mysterious "J".
Those
> of you on the Brit-po list might be interested to know that two trips
> to England bracket and (to some extent) encapsulate the story. The
> narrative proper begins with the search for a lost black cat named
Pushkin,
> and goes from there. I'm tempted to say more but I'm sure that's plenty.
>
> The new on-demand printing technology has allowed me to make this lengthy
> poem available pretty much all at once. I hope a few of you will find the
> time & patience to explore its Gothic nooks and crannies. Could someone
> kindly forward this to the Buffalo list?
>
> Thanks to all listeners & list-managers - Henry Gould
>
>
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