Agree. I don't know Joe Green from Joe Blue (and maybe he's flying, or, at
least not drowning under an 'eudodym' - but I find this a real wonderful
(albeit 'child sad') angle on the "Lives of the Poets."
I recollect these vintage boys who floated either drunk or variously on
pills in that axis between Chicago (The Chicago School) and New England
(Lowell, Plath et al). The Chicago School ones would appear variously at the
Poetry Center in San Francisco in the sixties (James Wright, John Logan -
tho I never saw Wendell Berry). Narcissistic, screwed up on booze, rising
enough to give a good reading and then to the booze filled,
self-congratulatory party after among fresh and old acolytes - you could
have scooped the depression up off the floor with a shovel.
It was fortunate when feminist writing and poets came along and gave this
mode of male poet narcissism a good battering. That was no fun - but
certainly altered a lot of obnoxious behavior.
But the poor mom (below) in her own narcissism obviously had little clue as
what appears (fortunately with some humor and good story at this point) a
battering of the child. Oy.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> Bit confused. This amazing story below - who wrote it? I love it.
>
> regards - jen
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: joe green <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Garrison Keillor on poets
> Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:49:51 -0800
>
> I read the poem at the age of nine.
>
> I started my great writer fantasy baseball league back in 57 when the
> poet X was living with my mother in our place in Cape May, N.J. he was just
> one of my mother's poetic lovers. In fact, you can pick up an old Oscar
> William's anthology and see most of these guys. The ones that were my
> mother's lovers all died fairly young, but more about that later. Anyway,
> the poet X and I started playing "Authors" during my mother's more than
> occasional absences (with, as it turned out, Poet Y). I can still see the
> poor guy in a ratty old sweater of my father's sipping Scotch and holding
> the cards in his shaky hands: "Do you have any Louisa May Alcott?" Poor
> jerk.
>
> After about the third day of a drizzly November (he wrote a little verse
> about that waiting beginning "In the Impossible November," so you can find
> out who he was if you want) he came downstairs early before I could escape
> with little pictures of all these authors pasted on index cards. He cut them
> out from my mother's books. He had about 100 cards. All the big guys were
> there complete with their stats. The poet X was big on the 18th century so
> he had Jane Austen leading the league in R.B.I.s. Alexander Pope (whom I
> eventually acquired in a trade and called "Sparky") was a great little
> shortstop, and so on. I can still remember my team and how the poet X
> cheated me. He talked me into picking Johnnie Keats for right field. "Look
> at this guy, Joe. He's young -- just 24 -- and has more promise than anybody
> in the league." He said almost the same thing about Chekhov ("Has a lot of
> heart.") so I had him at third base.
>
> We'd go through a season in about a week. One season, one year in fantasy
> time. I was really pissed when both Keats and Chekhov died in the middle of
> next season. "Tuberculosis, Joe. You can look it up." It was a lot of fun
> anyway. Poet X had Old Possum Eliot on the mound and every time he would
> strike someone out the poet X would cackle: "I do not think that they will
> sing to thee." My mother would call in the middle of one of these games and
> the poet X would take the call in the library. Muffled cries, whispers. My
> mother would ask to talk to me: "The poet X isn't doing too well, dear.
> Perhaps you two should go looking for Cape May diamonds."
>
> I didn't ask how the poet Y (who later threw himself off a bridge) was
> doing. I could hear the Vibra-Bed humming. My mother was quite fond of them.
> All of this comes back to me because my mother recently died and I am
> sorting through her effects. I came across book after book by young poet
> after young poet with inscriptions to my mother: "Snowflakes on stained
> glass." Peter "To the latest flake of Eternity" Trevor Not their real names,
> of course.
>
> God, how this boy's life comes back to me. I remember hating the poet Z.
> I was only about seven when he "boarded" with us. He's the guy who wrote the
> poem about the starfishes copulating. I remember that he read it to us and
> then went walking with mother on the beach. I followed with a sharpened
> stick and impaled every starfish I saw. (I know. "Who knows but that every
> starfish who mucks the moisty way is not an immense world of delight closed
> by your senses five?") But those starfish had to pay the price and I liked
> to imagine that they "screamed" "Haie, it is a good day to die!" as I pinned
> them wriggling each to each all on that misty moisty morning.
>
> One after another they ended up falling in love with my mother and I
> ended up with them as my mother went "To Rienzi's to meet a friend." The
> poets -- not the starfish.
>
> Poet Z had a face like a thermometer. I remember sitting across from him
> at dinner, lamb dripping from his chin (these guys loved lamb) as he called
> my mother "the pure product of America I am crazy about." All these guys
> would have to tell me why everything meant something when it happened to
> them when I would rather have been resting by some tidal pool reading _Bomba
> the Jungle Boy_. Is still liked the poet X though.
>
> He kept coming around every few years and mostly started hanging around
> with me. The scotch got to him and he would make up stories about the
> wonderful time he and my mother hadd in the "Pension Beaurepas," and greet
> my mother with "Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas" on the
> mornings when she would come down to breakfast. (Though the power is
> lacking, the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy). He also gave me a snowglobe
> (those little worlds so popular in Nabokov stories) inscribed with "All
> nature is a Heraclitean fire. Pray you, avoid it." He was a funny guy. My
> mother came back from the hairdresser with her hair a fiery red. The poet X:
> "See, see how Christ's blood streams in the permanent!"
>
> Ah, hell. She was quite fond of Marlowe. His happiest times were years
> ago in my mother's bedroom, the "Damnation of Faust" playing on her old
> hi-fi. I think she tied him up. It all comes back in nightly visions
> unimplored. "Bases loaded. Bottom of the ninth. And here comes Leo Tolstoy
> from the batter's box." My mother read all their long and marvelous letters
> and kept them all. I'm told that the Poet X's graffito can still be found
> next to a urinal in the City Lights bookstore. But, this is strange.
>
> A few nights ago I was going through my mother's books and found her old
> Oscar William's anthology with pictures of poets X and Y and Z (and Q and W
> and R). There is a big black X across each of their faces and, at the bottom
> of the page, in my mother's neatest Palmer penmanship: EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!
>
>
> Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > San Francisco must have been
> weirder than I thought.
> No, this was in Riverside, California (UC Campus). A desert, reactionary
> provincial town. Frank Bidart was a classmate. (Later, Billy Collins
> actually did his Ph.D at Riverside). So the isolation of the location
> probably induced a gothicism saturated with anglophilic profs pretending
> they were somewhere else beside the sagebrush and orange grove laden
> outback, or, bush. An erotic test let me tell you.
>
> The sins of Los Angeles were two hours away by a very slow bus.
>
> Stephen V
>
>>
>> At 10:09 PM 2/22/2007, you wrote:
>>> Alright, how many guys here read Prufrock aloud to a girl friend in
> either
>>> high school or as an undergraduate?? Retrospectively, that poem is/was
> such
>>> an odd 'turn on' - its implicit impotence, etc. But the guy, 'the
>>> speaker'!, I recollect, had/has pretty good rhythm, an impressive
> resonant
>>> sense of authority - a kind of curious, eccentric charm! (As much as
>>> Eliot's work was made complicit with New Criticism, the poem could still
>>> trump the anguish of learning that particular critical practice.)
>>>
>>> Now trying to remember what poems went well with 'courtly practice.' I
>>> suspect Miles Davis/ Gil Evans 'Round Midnight' trumped them all.
>>>
>>> And what poems when young (or older), if I can ask, moved, so to speak,
>>> women here.
>>>
>>> Ah, 'poetry and practice.'
>>>
>>> Stephen V
>>> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I first heard it read by Alec Guinness, in a programme that had Stephen
>>>> Spender talking about Eliot by way of introduction. Spender had already
>>>> explained the Italian before the reading began, and Guinness didn't
> read
>>>> that bit.
>>>>
>>>> P
>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to
>>>>> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
>>>>> Behalf Of Jon Corelis
>>>>> Sent: 23 February 2007 00:46
>>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>>> Subject: Re: Garrison Keillor on poets
>>>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>>>
>
>
>
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