For me, Mark, all 3 did, and not having yet read Ron's take, but just
what Alison posted of it, I would agree more or less. I certainly do
remember how deeply Sh played through O's reading of Melville, & that
late essay too (in Open Universe, right? my books also still in boxes).
Still the thoughts about Olson's poems as (american voice) soliloquys
are intriguing...
Doug
On 16-Apr-05, at 7:24 AM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> For reasons that escape me, fairly often messages I send to poetryetc
> make it into the archive but not into other listmembers' computers.
> Makes one feel occasionally marginalized in discussion. Case in point,
> a message sent last night: "Ron's there with the obvious , for a
> change. Olson's master's thesis Lear and Moby Dick (published in two
> parts in the first two issues of the magazine Twice a Year in 1938)
> became his first book, Call Me Ishmael (City Lights, 1947, and several
> reprints, and Johns Hopkins, 1997). He also wrote about Shakespeare's
> late verse, not surprisingly finding it a lot like his own. Someone
> will have to help me with the name of the essay, all of my things
> being entombed in storage.
>
> No reason you should know this, Alison, but Ron certainly does. Would
> have been nice if he'd mentioned his sources."
>
> Since then I came up with the name of the essay (also sent this to the
> list): "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays."
>
> Someone let me know if this comes through.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> At 05:51 AM 4/16/2005, you wrote:
>> Well, Olson goes on about Shakespeare quite a bit in *Call Me
>> Ishmael*. I hadn't thought of looking at his poetry in that light,
>> though. (I haven't looked at Silliman yet.) As far as Shakespeare
>> books are concerned, the one that I've read in recent years that
>> really got me humming was Michael D. Bristol's *Big-time
>> Shakespeare*, covering an awful lot of topics, from The Stationers
>> Company to *The Sandman*, Bakhtin to Branagh, early modern Christmas
>> to *Calvin & Hobbes*.
>> What version of Shakes is this NEA going to disseminate? Mrs
>> Grundy's? I only ask because one's heard a lot about school board
>> censorship etc in the States. I'm a little sceptical about Shakes
>> "generating" anything - can't see much evidence of that in
>> contemporary Britain, perhaps I'm missing something. I dare say a few
>> fundamentalist freaks have read Shakespeare - *their* way. -
>> Interesting that Creeley, at least during his youth, couldn't get
>> started (I'm broken-hearted) with Shakes at all, at least according
>> to his early correspondence with Olson. - Shakespeare a Lutheran? I
>> thought Purgatory was a no-no under the protestant dispensation, and
>> everyone is always going on about the Shakespeares' Catholic
>> connections.
>> Robin, no doubt, will clear this up.
>> mj
>>
>> Alison Croggon wrote:
>>
>>> Ron Silliman (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) has a most
>>> interesting
>>> meditation on the NEA program to bring Shakespeare to the American
>>> masses
>>> and its possibly unpredictable effects, given that two American
>>> writers
>>> deeply influenced by WS are Melville and Olson. Dang it, he's
>>> right...
>>> Though I hadn't made the Olson connection - Silliman's idea of
>>> soliloquy
>>> rather than "dramatic monologue" in Olson (maybe in a lot of modern
>>> poetry)
>>> seems particularly apt.
>>>
>>> "So much of Olson reads as tho it were written to be shouted out
>>> over a
>>> heath, or else to be whispered to an audience, a stage whisper
>>> capable of
>>> reaching hundreds of ears at once. It is not so much dramatic
>>> monolog tho
>>> Maximus is a persona as it is soliloquy. Olsonšs sense of how a
>>> sentence
>>> interacts with the line something I suspect an entire generation
>>> or two
>>> has internalized so deeply we donšt even recognize it has always
>>> struck me
>>> as coming right out of Shakespeare, far more than from Melville or
>>> Pound.
>>> This feel for the materiality of the relationship between the two is
>>> apparent, right there on the surface, in Olson, & through his
>>> influence it
>>> radiates outward. I can hear echoes in Creeley, in Duncan or
>>> Levertov, in
>>> OšHara & Whalen & even in Ginsberg. And it ripples again, just a
>>> little more
>>> faintly, through every one of us influenced by any of them.
>>>
>>> "So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing
>>> Shakespeare is, I
>>> suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEAšs leaders may
>>> comprehend.
>>> Because where it wonšt lead is back to is either the homogenous
>>> retro-utopia
>>> of so many a Congressmanšs dream nor to the same ol š stuff the
>>> School of
>>> Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the
>>> American
>>> literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men &
>>> wyrd
>>> sisters instead. As Olson himself most certainly was."
>>>
>>> I've been seeing a fair bit of WS lately (not only the stuff on my
>>> theatre
>>> blog, though I won't forget that Hamlet in the shop front, which was
>>> just
>>> wonderful...) Whenever I watch a good production - bad productions
>>> don't
>>> count - I come out so vitalised and stimulated. Oddly, only last
>>> week I
>>> watched the dvd of the RSC Macbeth Ron mentions, with Judi Dench and
>>> Ian
>>> McKellan. It also features one of my favourite actors, Bob Peck as
>>> Macduff.
>>> One of the darkest slants on Macbeth that you can imagine - Macduff
>>> comes
>>> out at the end having killed Macbeth, holding the daggers in the
>>> same way
>>> that Macbeth did from killing Duncan - and you realise that he's as
>>> crazy as
>>> Macbeth was. Now that's bleak; the world may seem to be righted,
>>> but you
>>> realise it isn't at all.
>>>
>>> Harold Bloom is erudite, of course, but I find him a bore on
>>> Shakespeare;
>>> well, I try to read him, but my attention peters out. Maybe it's
>>> too narrow
>>> a stream of water in all that rich delta of words. I like Kermode
>>> better;
>>> and Jan Kott is wonderful on WS in the mid-20C, and particularly its
>>> radical
>>> applications as a critique of power which was I think a big
>>> influence on the
>>> RSC. But now I'm really blithering.
>>>
>>> Interesting blog comments too - someone claims Shakespeare was a
>>> Lutheran,
>>> especially in Hamlet. Hmm. (Reminds me of the joke in Long Day's
>>> Journey
>>> into Night that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic). Considering how
>>> Hamlet
>>> turns out, I wouldn't want WS as an advocate.
>>>
>>> Best
>>>
>>> A
>>>
>>> Alison Croggon
>>>
>>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>>>
>>>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Hand and mind
and heart one
ground to walk on,
field to plough.
Robert Creeley
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