According to Silliman's blog, Gil Sorrentino has passed away.
He was my teacher at Stanford. I owe my first critical publication to him. I wrote papers on Koch and O'Hara for him as well as my article on WCW.
He was certainly in the tolerate no fools category--something I respected. Why he tolerated me is another question. I guess he was making an exception. Maybe it was because I saved his WCW seminar by always having something to say. He had never taught Graduate Courses before and was certainly out of his element--pedagogically that is. He certainly knew Williams backwards and forwards. He is "GS" in Paterson. Author of the letters signed "GS." Bet you didn't know that.
Maria Damon was in class the first day. She didn't like the fact that he was making male modernist poets like Williams into martyrs, complaining about how neglected they were. But it is important to realize that respect was very late in coming to Williams.
I also met my best Grad school friend, Bob Basil, in that class. Bob occasionally comments on this blog, using the name "Bob."
Gil didn't like teaching writing. He told me with scorn in his voice that the people in the writing program actually wanted to be professional writers and publish in the New Yorker. He made it sound an ignoble goal.
He loved Sonny Rollins.
I loved his ironic spoken "scare quotes." He was a funny guy. In Baraka's memoirs there is a thing about Gil, where Baraka is excited about the Cuban revolution and Gil says something about how he isn't crazy about all those guys in military uniforms. Kind of prophetic, in a way.
He didn't like the SF bay area much. Moved back to Brooklyn later.
His novels are better known and maybe even better than his poetry. Yet I still view him as a poet. I picked up some first editions of his works when I was in New York last Spring.
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I like the SF bay area very much myself. My parents grrew up in Berkeley and for us San Francisco was simply "The City." On the other hand I never lived in New York. only up state New York in Ithaca.
Sorrentino found SF provincial and small-townish in comparison with NYC. I was simplly stating a fact about him.
He admired SF poets like Spicer as well as "Black Mountain" folks and NY City school poets. It's true that he had his strong dislikes too. I remember him referring to John Gardner as "the Robert Bly of prose." In other words, someone who simply could not write.
I can hardly call myself a "student" of Gil Sorrentino's, seeing as I was in his grad class on contemporary fiction for about three weeks. (I do still own all the books, though: Burroughs, Acker, Matthews, Daitch, etc.: a hell of a reading list.) I'm guessing he never quite got over his unease with graduate teaching; it was wonderful to hear him talk but painful to listen to the other students struggle with the texts in front of them.
I do remember the day a few years later when we were reading Paterson in Al Gelpi's class and we realized that "GS" was Gil Sorrentino. That was pretty cool.
Mulligan Stew was one of my all-time favorite novels.
does anyone know the name of the GS novel that's all in questions?
Gold Fools, I think it is. Also "A Beehive arranged according to human principles" I believe is all in quetions.
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