The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings, New York Review Books, 288 pages, $16.95
Exactly a century after it first appeared, E.E. Cummings' novel The Enormous Room has been republished, reminding us that its author may have been the most profoundly libertarian writer in American literature. Beginning as a critic of authoritarian social situations, he wrote here mostly about his imprisonment in a French military detention camp at La Ferté-Macé during World War I. Eccentric and yet evocative, this classic is no less visceral a century later.
As a congenital free spirit, Cummings felt confined more than most. "The right-hand long wall contained something like ten large windows, of which the first was commanded by the somewhat primitive cabinet," he wrote. "There were no other windows in the remaining walls; or they had been carefully rendered useless. In spite of this fact, the inhabitants had contrived a couple of peep-holes—one in the door-end and one in the left-hand long wall; the former commanding the gate by which I had entered, the latter a portion of the street by which I had reached the gate. The blocking of all windows on three sides had an obvious significance: les hommes were not supposed to see anything which went on in the world without; les hommes might, however, look their fill on a little washing-shed, on a corner of what seemed to be another wing of the building, and on a bleak lifeless abject landscape of scrubby woods beyond—which constituted the view from the ten windows on the right."
Published before Cummings turned 30, The Enormous Room became his single most popular book. On the back of this new edition is an encomium from T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia: "From it I knew, more keen than from my own senses, the tang of herded men, and their smell. The reading is as sharp as being in prison, for all but that crazed drumming against the door which comes from solitary confinement." (When Lawrence reminds us that he too had been imprisoned, we note, by contrast, that few contemporary writers had a similar nasty experience.)
The best parts of The Enormous Room are Cummings' memories of other prisoners, each uniquely portrayed. For example: "Celina Tek was an extraordinarily beautiful animal. Her firm girl's body emanated a supreme vitality. It was neither tall nor short, its movements nor graceful nor awkward. It came and went with a certain sexual velocity, a velocity whose health and vigour made everyone in La Ferté seem puny and old. Her deep sensual voice had a coarse richness. Her face, dark and young, annihilated easily the ancient and greyish walls. Her wonderful hair was shockingly black. Her perfect teeth, when she smiled, reminded you of an animal. The cult of Isis never worshipped a more deep luxurious smile. This face, framed in the night of its hair, seemed (as it moved at the window overlooking the cour des femmes) inexorably and colossally young. The body was absolutely and fearlessly alive. In the impeccable and altogether admirable desolation of La Ferté and the Normandy Autumn Celina, easily and fiercely moving, was a kinesis."
He adds: "The French Government must have already recognized this; it called her incorrigible."
Notwithstanding his gut anarchism, Cummings did not write political polemics. He didn't sign petitions or march in the streets. The only sign of his "activism" that I can find is a 1948 letter to his daughter where he mentions working with "Margaret Dasilva, widow of Carlo Tresca, America's leading (murdered just a few years ago in NYC City by the USSR) anarchist."
Yet the anti-authoritarians recognized Cummings as one of their own. In his classic 1929 Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, the anarchist editor Marcus Graham reprinted Cummings' "Impressions," with these closing stanzas:
in the mirror
i see a frail
man
dreaming
dreams
dreams in the mirrorand it
is dusk on eartha candle is lighted
and it is dark.
the people are in their houses
the frail man is in his bed
the city
sleeps with death upon her mouth
having a song in her eyes
the hours descend
putting on stars….in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems.
Here and elsewhere, Cummings celebrated a libertarian utopia in which no one invades anyone else's life. This is also the subject of another, more familiar Cummings poem known only by its opening line: "anyone lived in a pretty how town." Even during the 1930s, he was nobody's fool.
This centennial reprint from New York Review Books is peculiar. As far as I can tell, its text reproduces what has long been available, initially from the legendary publishing firm Boni & Live-right, later from the Modern Library, later from other reprinters, some of which publish sloppily. It does not acknowledge the "typescript edition with illustrations by the author" that Liveright published in 1978.
The 1978 edition is superior in several respects. First of all, it includes the sketches prepared by Cummings himself, as much a visual artist as an author who illustrates his text in complementary ways. Second, it restores many French phases and, in a further departure that its author intended, prints them without the customary italics for languages other than English. Cummings' typescript also makes the stylistic choice of eliminating the spaces following commas. The typescript edition has other additions, including an introduction written by the young author's father, then a prominent minister, who describes the efforts to get his son released from prison.
The Modern Library edition, by contrast, includes a 1932 preface by Cummings that is oddly not reprinted here, even though it has this marvelous passage about the Soviet Union: "Russia, I felt, was more deadly than war; when nationalists hate, they hate by merely killing and maiming human beings; when Internationalists hate, they hate by categorying and pigeonholing human beings."
Cummings never again wrote a popular extended prose text. For his later European adventure—his 1931 report on Soviet Russia, EIMI—he favored a more liberating prose, exemplifying stylistic deviance in his critique of a society that cracked down on any and every sort of deviance. But it resembles The Enormous Room in one important respect: EIMI is a dispatch from a prison that was an entire society.
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]]>The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, Random House, 1,060 pages, $50
I first met the American novelist Ralph Ellison in the summer of 1963, when he gave a reading to a small audience at Columbia University. Beside me was the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who introduced me to the author. Since I then lived at the southern end of Harlem (as it bordered on Columbia) and Ellison lived in a northwest enclave on Riverside Drive, he invited me to his home.
Few writers visited that apartment—it was off their map, even though it was only a few miles north of Manhattan's Upper West Side, the favored cultural turf for Ellison's literary generation. Overlooking the lordly Hudson, it was filled with art, the latest technologies, and musical instruments, some of which he played for me. On one visit I recall him fingering part of a Brandenburg Concerto on his recorder.
In 1965, when the BBC asked me to do film portraits of New York writers, Ellison was my first choice. A little later, when contracted to do a book of extended profiles of major American artists and intellectuals, it seemed appropriate to feature him alongside John Cage, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, and Herman Kahn.
I particularly admired Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), not only for its rich style but for its intellectual complexity. In lush prose reminiscent of William Faulkner, whose influence Ellison acknowledged, the novel tells of a nameless narrator's life. Its events range from an unfortunate experience at a black college in the American South to the protagonist's disappointments in New York City, where he suffers a terrifying experience in a paint factory and then meets semblances of Communists and black nationalists, all vividly portrayed, before retreating into the artificially illuminated underground cave from which he's remembering his life. Some early readers thought the book autobiographical, which it wasn't. Nor was it meant to "protest" maltreatment of African Americans—one theme in Ellison's own commentary on the book is that the narrator, who doesn't even know his own name, is responsible for his own invisibility. That Invisible Man can be persuasively read in such different ways is a measure of its richness.
I thought I knew Ellison as well as anyone else a generation younger than he, but The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, now appearing a quarter-century after his death, tells me much that I didn't know. Within its thousand pages is—notwithstanding some repetition as Ellison retells the same stories—a richer portrait of the man than any previous scholar of his work had made.
The first theme of this book is that Ellison got better as a writer. Much better. Formally a music major at Tuskegee College—a degree he didn't complete—he did miscellaneous work around New York City, met the established authors Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and got married and divorced and then remarried, all before joining the Merchant Marine during World War II. Only after returning home, when he was already in his 30s, did Ellison move to Vermont to concentrate on his writing. Unlike some "born novelists," he was a late beginner; he never took a "writing workshop." If he ever read any British literature, it doesn't show.
Among Ellison's Vermont neighbors were Hyman and his wife, the novelist Shirley Jackson. Here he drafted the scenes that became Invisible Man, and his personal letters got better as well. My own hunch, not shared by Ellison scholars, is that Hyman, not only as a supportive colleague but as a critic with a highly developed sense of structure, helped put the parts together. (Only parts of his second novel ever appeared. Brilliant though they often were, neither he nor anyone else could put them together in his lifetime.)
Ellison's letters incidentally document how close he was in the early 1950s to the novelist Saul Bellow, nearly an exact contemporary, then likewise aspiring and ambitious, with whom he shared a wreck of a house in the Hudson River Valley. They also portray the importance of his early life in Oklahoma City, where he was born and lived until he was 20, never to return. Many of the richest and longest letters went to people from there, some of whom he hadn't seen for decades. Other letters recall at length his early experiences with his younger brother, Herbert.
An additional theme is how minimal was Ellison's contact with New York writers. His closest literary friend was Albert L. Murray, a few years behind him at Tuskegee, who likewise resided in Harlem.
Ellison in his letters gradually becomes more comfortable and adept at writing extended expository prose. Since he didn't do much writing in college (and never went to graduate school), longer exposition was a form he was slow to master. These longer letters in turn reminded me that, while his second novel remained forever unfinished, Ellison wrote some remarkable essays, various in length (and often clumsily structured), usually about African-American culture. One profound theme that recurs in them is that, though white and black America have mostly lived separately and unequally, they have interacted and are entwined in a uniquely American experience.
My own favorite, "The Little Man at the Chehaw Station," describes how Ellison had to go to New York City to discover the truth of his Tuskegee piano teacher's advice that when anyone performs before an audience, he or she must reach everyone within the space. Working around 1935 as a Federal Writers' Project interviewer in San Juan Hill (now the site of Manhattan's Lincoln Center), Ellison hears four large black "coal heavers" in a basement arguing about the divas at the Metropolitan Opera. When he finally asks them how they know so much about sopranos, one explains that they worked a gig there, as the Egyptians in Verdi's Aida.
Another recurring theme is Ellison's individualism. Never would he allow himself or his work to be put into a box containing only African Americans. It wasn't that he disliked his fellow blacks—they were his neighbors—but that he thought literary segregation confined him to a minor league. Especially in refuting the bullying critic Irving Howe and, later, black activists a generation younger, Ellison vehemently refused roles and purposes assigned to him. Indeed, he could be personally truculent.
Other invaluable letters have Ellison responding in detail about his intentions in particular scenes in his novel, which he remembered very well, though he confesses in passing that he didn't reread it. Though he studied European music, he writes only about Americans here, just as he did in 2001's Living with Music, a posthumous book collecting his music essays. I cannot think of another American writer whose culture was so thoroughly indigenous.
The most explanatory messages are directed to the man he chose as his unlikely literary executor, John F. Callahan, a white literature professor at a small Oregon college who'd never before been entrusted with such responsibility. In the years since Ellison's death, Callahan has prepared and published different editions of Ellison's long unfinished second novel, in addition to editing definitive collections of Ellison's essays and shorter fictions. Along with a younger academic, Marc C. Conner of Washington and Lee University, Callahan edited and annotated The Selected Letters.
If you've not read Ellison before, please start with his classic novel, which you won't forget, and then the single volume of collected essays mentioned earlier. (It includes "The Little Man.") Then you can tackle this valuable brick of a book.
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]]>The New Brooklyn: What It Takes To Bring a City Back, by Kay S. Hymowitz, Rowman & Littlefield, 198 pages, $27
Some decades ago, the great divide in New York City culture was between uptown and downtown. The former contained the prominent museums, the commercial publishers, and the WASP establishment. The latter held the less established artists and writers, the best galleries for selling recent art, and the independent intellectuals. Uptown New Yorkers often took pride in never going downtown, where people lived in shabbier lodgings, often renovated from factories. Those of us residing downtown, as I did from 1966 to 2010, thought we might get a nosebleed if we traveled north of 14th Street.
Toward the end of the last century, as downtown Manhattan became slicker, uptown people and institutions started to move downtown, often creating replicas of the areas they had left in a process commonly called gentrification. SoHo, the downtown neighborhood south of Houston Street, started as an industrial slum but became within 40 years a populous artists' colony and then a high-end shopping mall. Kay S. Hymowitz's The New Brooklyn describes how, in the late 20th century, a comparable gentrification developed across the East River in Brooklyn, a borough that had previously been a bedroom community for people who couldn't afford Manhattan.
The crucial truth of this sort of gentrification is that it's essentially extragovernmental. Politicians can't encourage it, because it starts with decisions made by individuals about where they want to live, often renovating newly purchased buildings for themselves and their partners, legal or informal. Developers, who by definition build for others, sometimes follow; other times, not. Governments customarily acknowledge gentrification at the behest of developers and voting residents, who are often in conflict with each other. In SoHo, the most extraordinary concentration of artistic excellence in American history wasn't "planned"—not by individuals and not by any public agency. Major developers never entered SoHo proper because some artists campaigned early to have it officially declared a "historic district" whose architectural integrity couldn't be violated. (The Trump SoHo hotel is actually several blocks west of SoHo proper, exploiting the neighborhood's fame at another address.)
The central setting of The New Brooklyn is Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Hymowitz and her family moved during the 1980s. Running slightly downhill from magnificent Prospect Park to the once-polluted Gowanus Canal, it was a century ago a mostly Irish working-class neighborhood filled with uniform-looking handsome brownstones arrayed on long streets.
Into Park Slope after 1980 moved young urban professionals, customarily called yuppies, who, 'tis said, couldn't afford the similar housing found on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They renovated the brownstones, often quite elegantly and sometimes idiosyncratically, as they occupied the streets running down from the park. The lower the number of the nearby crossing avenues (running down from No. 8), the less classy the side-street housing. Different subway lines could get Park Slope residents into Manhattan within 30 minutes.
While this story of What It Takes To Bring a City Back, to quote the book's subtitle, is a good and true account for Park Slope, Hymowitz appears to know less about other Brooklyn neighborhoods with slightly different histories. Just east of there, on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, is Prospect Heights, which had fewer white people than Park Slope; east of it is Crown Heights, which is still occupied by West Indians and ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews.
Well north is Boerum Hill, which had obstacles in ominous public-housing projects absent from Park Slope. Curiously, Hymowitz thinks the novelist L.J. Davis, whose 1971 book A Meaningful Life described an early Brooklyn renovation, resided in Park Slope when he actually lived in Boerum Hill.
Yet another part of Brooklyn, this one north of the active downtown area, is Williamsburg, which attracted artists who might have gone to SoHo before prices there suddenly escalated in 1980. Williamsburg offered artists empty factory buildings that were scarce in Park Slope and Boerum Hill. (Hymowitz notes that between 1950 and 2000, the number of blue-collar jobs in NYC declined from 1,000,000 to 43,000, leaving behind many empty industrial spaces now called lofts.) Indicatively, Hymowitz fails to mention the art galleries, once so populous here, perhaps because she doesn't know about them or, since they were scarce in her Park Slope, because she cannot recognize their importance in gentrification.
Though gentrification displaces people, she notes that the urban working class consists of apartment renters who are as inherently mobile as people in their 20s: Both are prepared to relocate to cheaper housing. Another truth about gentrification that she doesn't mention is that fearsome neighborhoods can be self-policing. One reason that my own Brooklyn neighborhood is not as foreboding as it used to be is that the bad guys have gone, if not to jail, at least elsewhere. During my own years here, a West Indian-Panamanian who worked evening security with his uniform suit and tie would come down my street most afternoons screaming Spanish epithets at the drug dealers operating out of a bodega and a cigar store. Now they're gone, and he's quiet.
While this book's chapters about Sunset Park and Bedford-Stuyvesant are informative, Hymowitz doesn't seem to know anything about Bushwick, which has become the favorite for artists and art lovers born after, say, 1980. The development of this "New Brooklyn" is yet more remarkable and surprising, because the 'hood resisted the efforts of urban planners for so long. What the wise guys couldn't imagine, and were slow to recognize, is that a semi-industrial neighborhood far from any large park or waterfront—as geographically distant from Park Slope as it is from Manhattan—could attract urban pioneers prepared to purchase and renovate.
The City of New York responded to these developments in the early 2000s by refurbishing the Canarsie subway line, now called the L-train, that services Bushwick. (This also benefited the developers who built high-end high-rise apartments along Williamsburg's coast on the East River.) In my 2014 book Artists' SoHo, I suggest that the current successor to SoHo is not a single circumscribed neighborhood but areas near stations along this L-train, most of which are east of Williamsburg. Now that its western precincts have become more expensive, I think gentrification will continue in Bushwick east of the Morgan Avenue stop, which has been for several years now the outpost of art galleries that have survived.
It might even reach my own (mostly Latino) neighborhood, which is four subway stops farther east, although one discouraging factor on my immediate avenue is a huge automobile junkyard with spare parts for the many small car-repair shops that constitute the principal business around here. A second obstacle is the presence, opposite the junkyard, of a vivero—a store traditionally selling live fowl. This one also offers live winsome sheep and goats, thanks to a young halal butcher in residence, and it stinks into the street, to put it mildly.
Jeuri Live Poultry Inc. has occupied its single-story building for decades, so it is likely to stay put until its customers for very fresh meat evaporate. (Free market rules.) Meanwhile, the owner of the junkyard told me recently, as he was closing his outer fence, that no developer has ever made him an offer for his land, even though the height of his piled wrecks has visibly declined over the past few years.
Conversely, my 'hood might mark an Old Brooklyn—an outlier of modest two-story residences between factories (and a mammoth Amazon distribution center), all of which resist development. Just east of me is a huge cemetery, which can't be violated. Either way, whatever happens, the city government can't move us.
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]]>Whenever John Cage performed, he insisted that the auditorium have accessible exits: A spectator who didn't want to stay, he said, should be able to leave easily. Cage—most famous for his 1952 composition 4'33", in which musicians sit in perfect silence for four minutes and 33 seconds—was a gut anarchist. Asked about the word ecology, the composer replied that whenever he heard that seductive word he knew he'd soon hear the word planning, and "when I hear that word, I run in the other direction." He boasted that he never voted.
Born in Los Angeles, Cage came in the 1940s to New York, where he quickly became known as not just a composer but as a radical aesthetician who profoundly influenced many colleagues in several domains. Though his achievements as a composer and a theater artist remain well-known, he was also a brilliant and original writer, especially at the intersection of poetry and politics. Emphasis on original—both his forms and his sentiments were unfamiliar.
More than two decades after Cage's death, a small press called Siglio has published a definitive edition of his major long text. Starting in 1965, Cage developed a poetic form he titled a Diary and accurately described as "a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories."
Among the constraints informing these writings were these: He would write less than 100 words each day, use no more than twelve different typefaces available at the time on an IBM Selectric typewriter (now antique), count no more than 45 characters in a single line, and change the typeface for each new statement. Earlier selections from Diary appeared as a pamphlet from the legendary Something Else Press in 1967 and in later perfectbound collections of Cage's essays published by Wesleyan University Press. This new handsomely produced hardback assembles all eight texts, the first seven written annually until 1972 and then an eighth, previously unpublished and perhaps incomplete, "continued" from 1973 to 1982.
Cage's informing theme is announced in the book's subtitle: How To Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Always is he predisposed to leave well enough alone; almost always are his sympathies libertarian. (The exception is a peculiar, unfortunate, and temporary admiration for Mao Zedong.) In addition to appreciating such '60s touchstones as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Norman O. Brown, Cage was influenced deeply by the American individualist anarchists. His guide to their work was James J. Martin's 1953 history Men Against the State. Martin for a while was Cage's Rockland County neighbor, and Cage would purchase copies directly from him. "It's one of those books I never have," he once told an interviewer, "because I'm always giving them away."
Cage was particularly devoted to Henry David Thoreau, whose texts he used in various ways—most brilliantly in his Song Books, where the performers repeat, "The best government/Is no government at all."
Cage's concise, almost short-handed remarks mix the personal and impersonal as they touch upon a wide variety of subjects, both aesthetic and social. As a collection of miscellaneous comments, Diary is best read not continuously, which can be daunting, but serendipitously for direct hits:
College: two hundred people
reading the same book. An
obvious mistake. Two hundred people
can read two hundred books.
Or this:
Music's
definitely improving. You can tell it
from the fact that more and more you
hear it in places where you can move
around. You don't sit in rows facing the
stage. It's no longer disturbing to
yourself or others if during the
performance you get up and leave.
Like the original Something Else pamphlet, and unlike the Wesleyan book, these Siglio pages reproduce the typography in various colors, making Diary a delightful reading and looking experience. All that's missing is the experience of Cage's reading these live, as he preferred to do, in his inimitable voice, whenever he was asked to "lecture." But you can sometimes hear his dry delivery as you see his words on the page:
Complete checkup. I was more
examined than ever before. Doctor's
report: You're very well except for your
illnesses.
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]]>Autonomedia has published many anti-authoritarian books over the past two decades, but none is as original or remarkable as its annual Calendar of Jubilee Saints. Measuring 17″ across and 11″ high, thus opening to 22″ high if you hang it on your wall, it is at once a month-by-month calendar, a work of book art, and a repository of useful critical information.
In every well-designed two-page spread for each month of the year is a box for every day of that month. Within each box is first a thumbnail photo or drawn portrait (usually by Seattle's James Koehnline) of someone dead who should be remembered by anti-authoritarians, broadly defined. For examples, consider from the end of this coming year: 24 December, Claudia Jones (a Trinidadian feminist and black nationalist—a name new to me); 25 December, Jesus of Nazareth (not new to me, but identified here as a "persecuted leader of an underground liberation movement"); 26 December, Cornelius Castoriadius (a Greek-French anti-statist philosopher); 27 December, Julien Benda (a French critic, especially of "intellectuals"); 28 December, Guy Debord (a French Situtationist agitator); 29 December, Sheikh Anta Diop (an African historian); 30 December, Victor Serge (an anti-Stalinist novelist and activist); 31 December, John Wycliffe (a 14th-Century religious dissident).
As these samples suggest, the political/cultural taste informing the selections for each date is eclectic, erudite, and discriminating. Along the calendar's margins is further information about each date. For 25 December, for instance: "1621—Massachusetts halts all sinful game-playing, confiscates children's toys. 1924—Twilight Zone creator Rod Sterling born, Binghamton, New York. 1989—Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausecu executed."
Only rarely would I excommunicate a selection, thinking that better choices must exist for days assigned to, say, Karl Marx (at least Lenin doesn't make it here), the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, the literary scholar Edward Said, the experimental novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the leftist biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the Marxist writers Antonio Gramsci and Paul Sweezy. Weigh these duds against perhaps 10 times as many whom you're pleased to see included, including many names previously unfamiliar, and you begin to appreciate the intelligence and literacy behind this heaven's gatekeepers. (The "anarchists" at Autonomedia wouldn't agree, but I'd add Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman to the roster.)
The calendar also includes advertisements of Autonomedia's conventionally sized books (including—full diclosure—some of mine) and a single-page knock-out stylish preface: "And since we have missed proper celebrations for most of the last millennium, we are proclaiming a Grand Jubilee—just maybe, here at the end of History, one crafted to last forever." It continues, "Steal back your own and every other life from the forces of freed and immiseration! Toss that monkeywrench! Throw that OFF switch. Hit that DELETE key! Join the Work-Resistor's League! Workers of the World, Untie! Get out NOW! Just say no! And leave no child behind!"
Under each saint's puss is a blank box in which you can write in some notes for each day or, as the preface advises, "If you are less than completely enthused with our choice for some day…go ahead and paste in your own Saint." The principle of choosing your own saint for the pantheon suggests a Catholic sensibility turned libertarian.
As the cover of this 21st calendar proclaims, "Every day a Holiday!" as indeed it should be in the libertarian millennium. I also recommend trying to find the 20 previous editions of the calendar and saving them, as I have done. As book art of a sort, they are at once very readable and quite beautiful; they will be treasured.
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]]>Tracy Daugherty, Joseph Heller's first and perhaps last biographer, reports that people who met the man found it hard to believe that such an amiable mensch wrote Catch-22, the classic 1961 anti-war, anti-bureaucracy novel. None of his later writings were nearly as good or beloved.
Critics have long thought that the genius behind Catch-22 reflected a collaboration between Heller and an ambitious young Simon & Schuster editor named Robert Gottlieb. The principal achievement of Daugherty's Just One Catch (St. Martin's) is documenting the extent of Gottlieb's handiwork. The question the book raises, making it more valuable than other conventional literary biographies, is how many other classic books were the result of similar teamwork. —Richard Kostelanetz
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]]>Ray Hammond's Poetic Amusement (Athanata Arts) began as an M.A. thesis at New York University in the late 1990s, and it circulated privately before it was formally published in late 2010. The book builds on familiar critiques of the corruption of poetry that proceeds from the proliferation of creative writing programs, where students and teachers pander to each other's prejudices and agendas. It's all true.
What's missing from Hammond's critique is a recognition that American poetry has divided into two worlds. The first is about the power that descends from holding a high and firm position in the cultural apparatus, usually as a tenured academic. The second is about independent influence upon readers and other poets. Only rarely do those worlds intersect.
Each envies what the other has. Independents envy money; academics envy influence and respect. Because poetry power has been harder to access recently, the ranks of independents are burgeoning, forming their own constellations.
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