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Adios, Richard Wilbur
I’m not sure what kind of knuckle-dragger one would have to be not to enjoy Richard Wilbur’s polished verse, whether or not one thinks its virtues amount to “a little too regular a beauty” [Randall Jarrell, quoted in today’s Guardian obituary]. I too prefer the rough magic of Lowell, Berryman, and Plath—but, as Robert Creeley famously wrote, “Love is dead in us / if we forget / the virtues of an amulet / and quick surprise.” These are the chief virtues of Wilbur’s poetry.Read More
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Cid Corman Reads William Carlos Williams
Cid Corman was a fine poet in his own write, but he was also a great and essentially selfless promoter of other poets, not just through his editorship of Origin magazine (founded in 1951), but through his many translations and his quirky, insightful essay on poets and poetry. What’s more, in 1949 Corman co-founded America’s first poetry radio program, This Is Poetry, at WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston.Read More
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Adios, Bo
This news is peculiarly affecting and spurred a fleeting impulse in me to write a poem about it. I say “fleeting” because I remembered that Richard Wilbur has already addressed the issue beautifully, although concerning a different people and a different language: To the Etruscan Poets Dream fluently, still brothers, who when youngTook with your mother’s milk the mother tongue, In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,You strove to leave some line of verse behind Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow,Not reckoning that all could melt and go.Read More
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A Conversation in Progress
Reginald Shepherd has put a thought-provoking post on his Harriet blog, which you should read here before going on. I thought I should aggregate the exchanges that followed between Reginald and me, if only because it’s fund (for some people) to experience writers thinking “out loud.” +++ Here’s my initial reply: Reginald writes: “Art emerges from and is conditioned by its social context, but it isn’t determined by it.Read More