interesting news. it seems almost fitting that after such a long
period of ingestion & dissertation on the WL, it's as though some
process has been completed & now it'll be, hopefully, disenchanted a
bit.
KS
On 29/05/07, Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> In this day of Memorial (in the USA), a curious note.
> T.S. Eliot's, The Wasteland, I was told last night, is no longer covered by
> copyright. Anyone - a big or small press or Online publication - can
> reprint it with new 'non-authorized' introductions or prefaces.
>
> I gather Eliot's executors were very tight about giving permissions, and
> getting top pound or dollar or whatever the currency.
>
> It will be curious to see how this one plays out in a now momentarily
> 'horizontal' publishing market place - or the ways in which a particular
> publisher might vault the work back into the most sought after edition -
> with 'privileged' but different new introductions by previously
> unacceptable x, y or z critics.
>
> And how new publications of "The Wasteland" play against the Eliot that
> remains under copyright.
>
> As someone who remembers too well when The Wasteland was the heavily
> protected crown-jewel in many an English Department, it's curious to see
> the jewel thrown back to 'the commons'. And what that might portend.
>
> Probably, for sure, a whole bunch of people in the textbook, etc. publishing
> industry who are grateful not to have to write and pay the Eliot Estate for
> permission to reprint the work.
>
> Stephen Vincent
>
> Walking Theory is my new book from Junction Press (84 pages, $12)
> For convenient ordering information, go to:
> www.junctionpress.com
> For a signed copy, email <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
> ... these are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his
> entire life. They definitely pass the ³take the top of your head off² test.
> I went cover to cover without even sitting up. Ron Silliman, Sillimanıs
> Blog, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ Go down to May 15, 2007
>
> At long last is Walking Theory, Stephen Vincentıs observant, large-hearted
> poems bundled into book form, engaging architecture, people on the move, the
> seasons and other transience, the talk that binds the day: Goodbye,
> rhetoric, the desperate,/what can the poem do, walking, step-by-step:/
> witness, suffer, hope. Urbane and companionable, rare virtues flaunted here,
> curbside delight. Bill Berkson
>
> Stephen Vincent's work here preserves and enhances the ancient association
> of the foot as measure of the poetic line. In Walking Theory measure becomes
> metaphor: ³...foot ever to the ground, image by image, /thought by thought,
> word by word...² This is the measure of the continuity of a poetıs life as
> he moves through the days, from the grief-stricken rhythms of the opening
> section of elegies to the more expansive tours of the San Francisco
> neighborhoods where he lives and works. Vincent celebrates the beauty of
> these familiar landscapes, as well as strange, unexpected and sometimes
> mundane details. In a wonderful pun that arises in the midst of the naming
> of spring flowers, ³the dotted eye² suggests the I of linguistic convention
> as the seeing, moving bodyıs eye transformed by language. Finally, in this
> serious play of words, the poets asks: ³what can the poem do, walking,
> step-by step:² and credo-like responds: ³witness, suffer, hope.² Beverly
> Dahlen
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