{"id":15202,"date":"2017-03-05T16:38:31","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T20:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15202"},"modified":"2017-03-05T16:38:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T20:38:31","slug":"reading-the-nytbr-on-bishop-lowell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/reading-the-nytbr-on-bishop-lowell\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading the NYTBR on Bishop & Lowell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[FB’d this in dismay this morning; but seems worthwhile to keep track of on my blog. It concerns a\u00a0review<\/a> of Elizabeth Bishop,\u00a0A Miracle for Breakfas<\/em>t by Megan Marshall, but mainly Patricia Bosworth’s review<\/a> of\u00a0ROBERT LOWELL, SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE\u00a0A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character\u00a0By Kay Redfield Jamison.]<\/p>\n

So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper New York Times, skip all the outside layers of toxic DT-news & -non-news, dig all the way to the travel-section, knowing that in its fold they hide the weekly Book Review. For years now I haven\u2019t had any truck with the NTBR, except for checking their non-fiction reviews from time to time. Opening it this morning I instantly come across what I fear most: their take on American poetry \u2014 & I\u2019m instantly a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the \u201cpaper of record,\u201d it was the same names I saw bandied about: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell. Clearly, the NYTBR suggest, nothing has happened in American poetry since then, though even back in 1967 \u2014 I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago \u2014 they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the 20C century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII. So here we have a former student\u2019s\u00a0 biography-memoir of Bishop, who is a competent to, at times, good minor poet with a smallish oeuvre of about 100 poems but a very sad life-story, which is of course what creates the draw. So be it.<\/p>\n

Then there is another biography of Lowell, another sad & depressing life-story of this Boston upper-class male who went from riches to lithium. What irritated me enough to write this note, however, is the reviewer,\u00a0 Patricia Bosworth\u2019s, description of Lowell as \u201ca towering figure in the world of letters [well, maybe in certain limited quarters he still is, but less & less so\u2026] \u2014 a two-time Pulitzer winner [OK, that\u2019s the usual lazy way reviewers alibi the claims to literary greatness] and the successor to Ezra Pound [what?! No way: Lowell is totally not the successor of Pound \u2014 he is exactly the opposite!] The reviewer then goes on to state (I could say \u201cbrazenly\u201d) that Lowell\u00a0 \u201ccarved a niche with reams of innovative poetry he churned out in bold, often experimental styles. His subjects were wide-ranging and epic: the Greek myths, the American Revolution.\u201d If Lowell\u2019s writing is Bosworth\u2019s idea of \u201cbold\u201d and \u201cinnovative\u201d poetry, then that shows at least a profound ignorance of 20C poetry, American or other, on her part. Lowell\u2019s idea of \u201cepic\u201d and history are, as David Antin showed many years ago, \u201call out of the elementary school history text,\u201d and \u201c\u2026Fourth of July speeches. It is cocktail-party intellectual history.\u201d<\/p>\n

That at this point of our ever more troublesome history, the same platitudes can still be spewed forth in the \u201cpaper of record,\u201d\u00a0 is profoundly dispiriting \u2014 but to be expected from the NYTBR. To any reader interested in an accurate account of the history of poetry in those years, I can only recommend to go to & read the already mentioned essay by David Antin, \u201cModernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in Modern American Poetry.\u201d (in David Antin, Radical Coherence: Selected Essays on Art and Literature<\/i>, Chicago University Press, 2011, pp. 161-196). Among many other insights, Antin makes clear the lineages of modern & postmodern American poetry: \u201c\u2026Eliot and Tate will lead to Lowell and even Snodgrass, while Pound and Williams will lead to Rexroth, Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Nuff said for this morning; returning now to the pleasures of Nate Mackey\u2019s Late Arcade<\/i>, the fifth volume of his ongoing prose work From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate<\/em>, just out from New Directions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[FB’d this in dismay this morning; but seems worthwhile to keep track of on my blog. It concerns a\u00a0review of Elizabeth Bishop,\u00a0A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall, but mainly Patricia Bosworth’s review of\u00a0ROBERT...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,90,91],"tags":[1910,556,1912,1911],"class_list":["post-15202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-poetics","category-poetry","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-new-york-times-book-review","tag-patricia-bosworth","tag-robert-lowell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15202"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15208,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15202\/revisions\/15208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}