Douglas Barbour wrote:
> That's an interesting one, for sure. I tend to agree with the witty attack
> on the New Formalists by Eliot Weinberger, but there are some writers out
> there who have done very well since the 30s. Marilyn Hacker in the US, for
> example. Some of the Australian & NZ poets of the past half century. But I
> confess to not knowing many in North America...
>
> Doug
It's still curious to me that Eliot Weinberger and David Antin came highly
recommended in 1996 via CD Wright after she read a fragment I was working on.
She threw in William Bronk but I found (at the time) he didn't say a word to
me. Weinberger was the last of this threesome I discovered. He writes a
gorgeous, non-academic (i.e., it's in English) but erudite prose style, which
is to say in repetition of an old cliche that he wears his learning
beautifully. Antin...Antin's "Tuning" absolutely blew me away and still does
so. Part of me thought of him as what that Mel Brooks movie called "a stand-up
philosopher," doing highly intellectual schtick. Yet I stole more of Antin's
devices that I knew what to do with, probably without getting any of his power
to free associate and yet make it all cohere. There wasn't that much anxiety
to his blooming influence: when I got to writing the ongoing Divorce Poems
several fit the wide-spacing style he affects for the prose "translations" of
his lectures--they allowed me to be breathy and jerky and (I hope) violate the
idea that ya gotta be consistent and flowing all da time.
Oddly, Wright did not recommend Frank Stanford (there is no tongue in my cheek
here), even though the fragment I showed her--when I discovered "The
Battlefield, etc." last spring--reminded me of my old work. Yet my craziness
even in discussing bizarre topics--a couple's adultery against the backdrop of
the OJ Simpson trip in the Bronco--can't begin to touch Stanford's maniacal
sense of humor. If Stanford wasn't funny, my writing isn't
(intentionally)--his description of the Last Supper and Betrayal of Jesus done
of Arkansas black dialect is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
Ken <a tangential being>
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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