¡Bemsha SWING!

25 may 2006

I hate the "Pound-Williams Tradition." Don't you?

I respect all the poets in this so-called tradition, I even like the tradition itself for the most part. What I don't like is the idea that there is this single line of transmission. I would rather have a Pound-Williams-Roussel-Artaud-Stein-Breton-Rilke-Brecht-Larrea-Vallejo-Yeats-Stevens-Cavafy-Pessoa-HD-Djuna Barnes-María Zambrano-Char tradtion. Maybe that name's a little too long, but you get the point. Why measure poets by their proximity to Pound and Williams? El mundo es muy ancho.

Surely a lot of poets get overvalued because they are in the P-W Tradition. They play for our team. PW is worse than PC.

5 comentarios:

Ray Davis dijo...: I didn't even know they _were_ a tradition! What a bizarre pairing. Would a "follower" of this tradition expatriate for six months of every year, like Persephone? A "Yeats-Pound" tradition is a lot easier to picture: snobs who chant.; 4:54 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Well there was an actual scholarly journal published at the University of Maine and devoted to poets in the Pound-Williams tradition quite explicitly. I can't come up with the name off the top of my head, but I'm thinking it starts with an S. It's the premise behind the whole "Man and Poet" series at Maine too. Oppen, Man and Poet, Williams, Man and Poet, Niedecker, Woman and Poet. Strictly Pound, Williams, Objectivists, plus Black Mountain.; 6:04 p. m.
Ray Davis dijo...: I forgot that combination showed up in the Sagetrieb subtitle after a while. (Or, in the two issues closest at hand, "the Pound-H.D-Williams Tradition" -- no period after the "D".) And a simple Google shows that the formula (minus H.D., of course) at some point became a commonplace which I've just skimmed past until you focused my attention on it.

So now I know the "tradition" you mean. The names selected to represent it are so arbitrary, though. I also find "Pound-Williams-Zukofsky", "Pound-Williamns-Reznikoff", "Pound-Williams-Stein", "Whitman-Pound-Williams"... They should've just said "Objectivists & Their Pals", or "What Hugh Kenner Likes", or "Americans with Big Ideas who Never Got Rich". Or Robert Duncan's contribution, "that Marianne Moore, Pound, / Williams, H.D., Stein, Zukofsky / Bunting, S.J. Perse, surrealist / Dada staind pot."; 8:33 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Sagetrieb, that's it. I guess the added HD to include a woman and place the origins of the tradition at Penn where the three first met.

There are a lot of poets who are larger than life aside from Pound and Williams. It all depends on one's perspective.; 9:49 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: I thought I'd heard "Yeats-Eliot tradition" quite a bit, more than Pound/Eliot. I googled the phrase and the first thing that came up was an article entitled "Spanish Poetry and Anglo-Ameican Modernism: The Legacy of Andrew Debicki," by Jonathan Mayhew.

You could find the most improbable combination of poets and see where the limits of these traditions lie.; 11:46 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

25 may 2006

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