Although I considered myself already a relatively sophisticated
reader of poetry (as a Franco- & Germano-phone I had read Rimbaud,
Mallarmé, Lautréamont, breton, and Benn, Brecht, Celan, to name the
most obvious) & came to English-language poetry via Bob Kaufman,
Ginsberg & Kerouac, when I started to really read into English-
language poetry at 16, I went or was sent, nearly immediately, to TS
Eliot — & Prufrock became central : I liked the poem immediately, the
speech-rhytmns, the weariness, the images (I had visited London &
recognised the drabness, or thought I did), was awed & delighted by
the "intellectual" complexity of it & the demands it put on any
reading beyond the most superficial one & in fact committed it to
memory — one of the rare ones I did, though I can only remember about
10 lines of it now. And as I started to write in English at the same
time, it was an awesome inspiration. A later year I moved to the US
to go to college here & came right away across Williams — who blew
Eliot out of the water for me. All the nasty stuff is true: anti-
semite royalist fascist neurotic tight-ass Brit who as WCW said did
put US poetry back 1/2 century, and yet, there isn't any way around
Mr. Pruf and the Waste land, and I do agree with most of the points
in Perloff's more recent essay on Eliot's early work as truly
constructivist avant-garde, until the end of WWI, the death of his
lover, and the general collapse of the West sent him to Barclays Bank
& the Church of England. — Pierre
On Feb 22, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Jon Corelis wrote:
> On encountering Prufrock as a midwestern teenager myself I
> immediately liked
> it and didn't worry about the Italian, which I couldn't read
> either, or
> about trying to understand it. The important thing was that it
> sounded
> neat. That's probably a good description of what is still my
> aesthetic
> position.
>
> I've always felt the full effect of Prufrock would be brought out
> by having
> Boris Karloff read it.
=============================
"Fascism should more properly
be called corporatism,since it is the
merger of state and corporate power."
— Benito Mussolini
=============================
Pierre Joris
244 Elm Street
Albany NY 12202
h: 518 426 0433
c: 518 225 7123
o: 518 442 40 71
Euro cell: (011 33) 6 75 43 57 10
email: [log in to unmask]
http://pierrejoris.com
Nomadics blog: http://pjoris.blogspot.com
=========================
|