I got the official letter from the Provost yesterday approving my promotion to Full Professor. The Chancellor still has to sign off on it but I'm assuming that's more or less pro forma. In April my two books are coming out (maybe there's a connection here?) Things are looking very good, in other words. My only wish now is for a vacation. I haven't really taken more than two or three consecutive days off since August of 07.

[Update: now it's official. I got a second letter indicating the chancellor's decision.]

I still remember vividly one of the first papers I wrote in Graduate School, for Al Gelpi's imagism class, in the fall of 1981. My thesis was that WCW had been seen as a mostly descriptive poet, but that this was wrong. Williams's poems were urgent speech acts, rhetorical arguments, not static descriptions. I placed emphasis on the "I must tell you," or the "so much depends" rather than on the thing described.

The poem I chose to analyze was "The Jungle," which I can still recall: "It is not the still weight of the trees..." I talked about how most of the poem was actually the negation of a description, hence had a rhetorical force, since the reality being described was meant to be held in suspended animation. It was, essentially, a negated cliché, leading to the final conclusion of the poem: "a girl waiting, / shy, brown, soft eyed / to lead you / upstairs sir." I loved how the poem ended with the words of the girl, without quotation marks.

I am amazed that I still recall this so well. I could probably even re-write it now from memory. It wouldn't be the same sentences, but it would be the same argument. What was good about it, I think, is that I had found something about which the existing consensus was obviously and outrageously wrong, and explained persuasively why this was the case, and why my view was more interesting and fruitful. How did I come up with something like this? Probably from reading Williams for many years before I even got to grad school, and trusting my own view more than the irritating people who thought of him as the purveyor of boring, static descriptions. Trusting my own irritation.

I just heard that the College P & T committee has approved my promotion to (full) professor. Why they have to do this on New Year's Eve I don't know. Actually, the letter was there on the 29th, but the Chair of my Dept. was at the MLA until now, so I couldn't find out the results till she got back, looked at the letter, and gave me a call.

This now goes to the University P & T committee, so I'll know something even more officially by April.

I think my book makes several distinct contributions:

1. There hasn't been much good critical writing on Kenneth Koch. There's the Harry Mathews essay on The Duplications, for example, or the preface to the Selected Poems by Padgett, and shorter pieces by Jordan Davis, some unpublished, but pickings are slim. There are plenty of University Press books with one chapter on Ashbery, or one chapter on O'Hara, but usually Koch is left out of the equation. My chapter on Koch will be one of the most distinctive scholarly contributions to the study of his poetry. Although the focus is on his rewriting of Lorca, I think I also illuminate his work in other ways à propos of that.

2. My treatment of the Deep Image school is one of the most in depth available. I deal with both the Bly/Wright and the Rothenberg/Kelly branches of this school, taking the debate one step further than Jed Rasula's excellent piece.

3. My chapter on Spicer is also among the most in-depth scholarly/critical treatments of this poet. I have relevant things to say about his practice of dictation. If After Lorca is a significant work of American poetry, then my treatment of it is also significant. I go one step beyond previous treatments: Blaser, Eshleman, Chamberlain.

4. The contextualization of American poets in relation to the cold war might be useful, even though my treatments of O'Hara, Kaufman, Ginsberg, and Duncan do not really break new ground, but my overview of this period, emphasizing a certain romanticism, might be useful even if you don't care about Lorca.

5. I have some relevant things to say about the practice of translation as it relates to the cultural history of the 1950s. There is very little nit-picking about how translators should have translated. Instead, there is a deeper contextualization of the entire enterprise.

6. While this isn't a book about Lorca per se, in an odd way it illuminates his work through the use of "negative space." I think it will be one of the top books about Lorca, alongside contributions by full-fledged lorquistas like Christopher Maurer and Andrew A. Anderson.

7. It will be impossible to think of the duende the same way after reading my book.

8. It's kind of a good model of the "reception study," a staple of Comparative Literature since there was a Comparative Literature. It shows that a reception study can be hip, funny, and smart, as opposed to kind of a deadly catalogue. It doesn't break wholly new ground in translation studies, but is a good application of ideas pioneered by Venuti.

9. I like the way I integrate aesthetic criticism with political and social concerns. I show how you can't really evaluate the literary colonialism involved in adapting Lorca to the American agenda without taking a serious look at the aesthetic/poetic effects. [Please forgive my immodesty here: believe me I had to twist my arm for several hours before I could write this post. Now both of my arms are hurting: the one that did the twisting and the one that was twisted. I feel that I should promote this book because the University of Chicago Press is putting its resources into its publication. It would be selfish of me to be too modest, just so you would not think of me as being too arrogant.]

10. Finally, if you know and like me, it is fun to read. It has everything that makes me a distinctive writer/critic/intellectual. It has poetry, jazz, a sense of humor. A provocative intelligence and a certain acerbic wit. I couldn't have written it without being me. Or, put another way, I was uniquely situated to write this particular book, by traiing, temperament.

Both my books are going into production at the same time. Outside readers should be getting my material soon for my promotion. At some point around the beginning of 2006 I decided I wasn't going to stand in the way of myself any more. It wasn't a question of working harder but of working smarter and assuming the responsibility of being who I really am. Those two books together give me a clam to some expertise in three separate fields: Lorca, Spanish poetry of the last two decades of the 20th century, and American poetry of the post-war era (the New American Poetry and all that). That's not even counting my first two books.

By standing in my own way I mean procrastination, mostly. That's the easiest form of self-sabotage. You don't even have to do anything, just stand by. The Twilight of the Avant-Garde book took a while to come together, and sat in the melancholy drawer for quite some time. The Lorca came together quite quickly and had no melancholy drawer time at all. There's a lesson here: even the same person can produce work in different patterns. There's no one way to write a book, but the quick and easy way is preferable.

I now have a contract with the University of Chicago Press to publish my Lorca book, once I've written the rest of it. My email was down all day, with the message from the editor waiting there for me in the inbox. I decided to check one last time before I went to bed and finally got through.

Here's one thing I do: if I finish a chapter, as happened today, and I still have another ten minutes left in my scheduled writing time, I immediately start to work on some other section of the book. I don't just celebrate and stop working for the day. It's a way of letting the momentum carry you forward. That extra ten minutes of writing will produce some extra ideas in the shower the next morning.

***

You've all heard of the professor who doesn't publish much, but his/her work is of high quality, etc... That's always seemed counter-intuitive to me. Such people do exist, as well as the proverbial academic who turns out huge quantities of bad material. But the general human pattern is that if you do more of any activity you'll get better at it. If you're good to begin with, you'll get better. Even the mediocre overproducer will probably get better over time. The brilliant person who writes one or two articles will never get to the that 10th or 20th article that is even better. So my second stupid motivational principle of the day is that quantity, intelligently managed, produces quality.

***

I have some horrible work habits too. When I talk about how much I'm getting done you should understand that I am a lifelong procrastinator, very disorganized, who could have produced several more books in my career were it not for my essential laziness. I've always had the drive to publish, and have done enough for a successful academic career, but until recently I was not husbanding my efforts very effectively. I was actually holding myself back.

I became a specialist in Spanish literature because of "deep image" poetry. Not directly, because it was never my favorite kind of poetry exactly in English, but because of the general climate of interest in Latin American and Spanish poetry during the late 70s, a formative time for me. The Nobel prize went to Vicente Aleixandre in 1977. I wanted to read the stuff in the original, go back to the sources. You know how snobbish I can be, but I was even worse back then.

Now reading Greg Kuzma and the like, I see no connection to Spanish-language poetry at all. The Spanish roots of contemporary American poetry are very shallow, generally speaking and with significant exceptions.

I single out Kuzma because to me, in my memory at least, he is Generic Deep Image Guy of the 70s.

Logically, the Spanish department should be full of me, full of people brought into the field by the ubiquity of Neruda during the 70s. I'm sure there are others, but that's not the typical person in the field in my experience. When I realize this then I know how to make certain adjustments in dealing with people. For example there is Latin American Leftist without a strong interest in literature in the first place. He came into the field for largely political reasons. There the person who majored in Spanish and just kept going, eventually developing an interest in literature, but an interest largely confined to what was taught in the curriculum.

Words I want to use very soon in my chapter.

lithic, chthonic, syllepsis, tmesis, gnomic, hapax legomenon

There's a flavor to Greek vocabulary that isn't there in Latinate words. Even visually those ch, ph, th, gn, ic, esis clusters give your prose a certain look. It's not for the sans serif in spirit.

I want to use the phrase "hubristically shallow judgment." I fact I did use it.

Thanks to Jerry Seinfeld I now have 12,800 words in this chapter. I like the moment, though, when the word count starts shrinking rather than growing. Then you know you're closer to compleiting it, because you're taking converting the last of the disconnected phrases into actual sentences and then making the prose more concise, taking out a few digressions. I'm hoping once I have 60 pages I can bring it down to 45 again. Otherwise it will split into two chapters.

I was suprised to see Gary Snyder called a "deep image" poet in one of the secondary sources I was looking at. That's weird.

My field is a ghetto. There is a good deal of integration between those who study film, culture, and novel of contemporary Spain, between Cultural Studies and studies of the novel. Those who study poetry, however, usually just study poetry, and people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry, as though that were just some minor insignificant corner of the literary world that could be safely ignored.

Of course, ultimately every academic field is a ghetto. It's just a matter of the size of the particular ghetto.

Anyway, what I often try to do is to publish places where my article will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on "poetry." My favorite in this respect is the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies published in the UK.

Why doesn't "culture" include "poetry"? This is a tricky question that has to do with the way disciplinary boundaries are drawn. My attitude toward all of this is that everyone should study what they want, but just don't leave me out of it.

When did the novel get to be so important? Obviously it's not because Spanish novels are more accomplished than Spanish books-of-poems. The opposite is the case. Cela gets the Nobel prize? That's just ridiculous. Marías is ok, but don't tell me his work has the historical weight of Gamoneda's. Is it as simple a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

If you want to look at the consumption of cultural products, then you'd have to say that dubbed Hollywood movies are an extremely significant part of contemporary Spanish culture. Or translations of books by Michael Crichton or Paul Auster (not to put them in the same category).

LAWRENCE, Kan. -- Kansas Associate Professor of Spanish Jonathan Mayhew got a five-year contract extension Thursday that bumps up his annual compensation to more than $1.3 million.

Under the deal, which began retroactively on April 1 and goes through March 2011, Mayhew will be paid $220,000 in salary with additional payments for professional services, public relations and promotional duties -- boosting his annual compensation to $1.375 million. He could make an additional $350,000 per year if he meets certain incentives.

He was previously paid $129,380 in annual salary.

"I am excited because we love it here at KU," Mayhew said. "We love the students in our program, we love the direction that we're going and we love the people that we work with. We're very excited to be a part of it for at least five more years."

Also in the deal is a retention agreement that would pay Mayhew an additional $225,000 for each year of the extension, effectively bumping his annual salary to just over $1.6 million if he's still an Associate Professor through March 2011. Mayhew wouldn't receive the extra money until then.

I've decided to write a review essay on Gamoneda for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Of course they'll have to accept it first.