{"id":8563,"date":"2012-06-30T08:36:18","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T12:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=8563"},"modified":"2012-06-29T10:36:42","modified_gmt":"2012-06-29T14:36:42","slug":"captain-poetrys-sucker-punch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/captain-poetrys-sucker-punch\/","title":{"rendered":"Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I don’t like Big Beach Novels for the summer, as novels invariably wind up boring me, but I do enjoy having a Big Booke of something-or-other to schlepp around from airport\u00a0lounge\u00a0to train station to rental car office \u2014 & to whatever home or motel or inn I’ll rest my bones reading, reading, reading. Happy to report that I most likely have found that book for this summer: Kenneth Warren’s Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012<\/em>, with an introduction by Dale Smith, an afterword by Ammiel Alcalay, & published by Blaze Vox in 2012.<\/p>\n

I opened it by chance on the essay “Clayton Eshleman and the Poetics of Relationship” the day after I posted on Eshleman’s latest book, An Anatomy of the Night<\/em>, and Ken Warren’s piece certainly rhymed with much of my thinking (not necessarily so much the thinking in that small post, but more generally & widely with my overall appreciation of CE’s\u00a0oeuvre<\/em>). What is most intriguing to me about the book is that it covers\u00a0exactly\u00a0those authors I have always felt were not just underrated but even when highly rated, under-reviewed, under-estimated. It is thus a great pleasure to find intelligent writing on as widely arrayed a set of poets as, among others, Bob Kaufman, Ed Sanders, Rochelle Ratner, \u00a0Diane Ward, Maxine Chernoff, Ray Bremser, Diane Wakoski, Hugh Seidman, Lewis Warsh, Richard Blevins, Jack Hirschman, Nathaniel Tarn, Anselm Hollo, Richard Grossinger or John Clarke \u2014 besides the more obvious Olson, Duncan, Creeley headliners.<\/p>\n

Since my own locale (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) deeply interests me, I quickly went to Warren’s piece on the big boy from the hood, Gilbert Sorrentino \u2014 & found his 1985 essay a most thoughtful, probing & insightful introduction to Sorrentino’s work, both as poet & as novelist.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here is what\u00a0<\/span>Albert Glover<\/strong> [editor of Letters for Origin, 1950\u20141956 by Charles\u00a0Olson, (Cape Goliard, 1969)] has to say about the book:\u00a0\u201cThe title of Ken Warren\u2019s selective and provocative history of \u00a0American poets and poetry over the past thirty years comes from an \u2028incident partially narrated in Tom Clark\u2019s Charles Olson.<\/em> <\/span>The Allegory\u2028 of a Poet\u2019s Life<\/em> [318] in which Gregory Corso makes a disruptive\u2028 appearance in Olson\u2019s afternoon seminar on myth, 1964. I say \u2028\u201cpartially\u201d because as a member of that class and a witness to the \u2028events of that afternoon it seems to me Clark omits a few important \u2028facts, e.g. that after challenging the assembled students to match him \u2028in reciting from memory lines of Shelley (or perhaps by extension any \u2028poet) and hearing only universal silence, Corso began pointing out \u2028with increasing intensity that \u201cwe are all on death row\u201d and that he\u2028was \u201cCaptain Poetry\u201d. Finally he turned to Olson: \u201cAren\u2019t I Captain \u2028Poetry, Charles?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d Olson replied. \u201cThen what should I do?\u201d\u2028And without missing a beat Olson said calmly and with some humor, \u2028\u201creport for duty.\u201d David Posner, the Curator of the Lockwood Poetry\u2028 library, never stepped into the room \u2013 the fracas happened after Corso \u2028had fled Olson\u2019s class. It did not then and has never since seemed to \u2028me that Olson asked Corso to report to him, though the exchange might \u2028be interpreted so; rather, I took Olson to mean report to Poetry. \u2028Certainly that\u2019s what Olson was teaching. And it\u2019s worth mentioning \u2028here because Ken Warren\u2019s work over the past three decades, both as \u2028editor and publisher of House Organ (an occasional magazine in which \u2028some of these pieces first appeared) and as a freelance essayist and \u2028critic outside academic writing, constitutes the sort of discipline,\u2028dedication, and persistence which Poetry has demanded from him, not as \u2028a maker of poems but as a friend, an ear, a receptive mind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t like Big Beach Novels for the summer, as novels invariably wind up boring me, but I do enjoy having a Big Booke of something-or-other to schlepp around from airport\u00a0lounge\u00a0to train station to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24,36,90,91,94],"tags":[1240],"class_list":["post-8563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-books","category-criticism","category-poetics","category-poetry","category-poets","tag-kenneth-warren"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8563","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=8563"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8576,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8563\/revisions\/8576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}