[lit-ideas] All the girls said so

  • From: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2015 10:58:18 -0700

Just read an interesting article in the /London Review of Books/, which I stopped subscribing to a couple of years ago but get the occasional copy and invitation to resubscribe which after reading an article by *"August Kleinzahler <http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/august-kleinzahler>* lives in San Francisco. /The Hotel Oneira/ was published last autumn " I did.

The article is entitled "All the Girls Said So" which is a quote from or about John Berryman: "The youthful Berryman was a splendid dancer – all the girls said so. That was before he began falling down with regularity and breaking bones."

Kleinzahler assesses the poets of the Robert Lowell generation. I spent some time with Lowell's poetry and some criticism recently and ended up liking him slightly better than I did previously. I read Berryman's /77 Dream Songs /and liked them a lot, ended up buying all his poetry eventually. As happened with Kleinzahler I discovered that Berryman didn't wear well. The same has been true (for me) of Sylvia Plath. I was overwhelmed when I first read /Ariel, /but couldn't get caught up in anything else she wrote. I was interested enough in her personally to follow the career of Ted Hughes whom David Myers decided to concentrate on toward the end of his involvement with Phil-Lit. I wrote a lengthy and unfavorable analysis of Hughes poetry but never heard back from Myers. Maybe that was the straw that broke his Phil-Lit back -- probably not though. He was already on his way out -- not handling the debates he was having on politics, especially with Andreas Ramos -- affected his health if I remember correctly.

I've read all of the poets Kleinzahler reviews, Bishop not terribly well and Roethke hardly at all. I enccountered a few things I had not heard before, that Bishop was a Manic Depressive and alcoholic is one. I had always thought of her as being well balanced and in control.

I read Randall Jarrell, the critic of the Lowell age, but couldn't get enough caught up in his writings to be as impressed as the poets he criticized were. I read all of Delmore Schwartz poetry once -- and agree with Kleinzahler that his poetry isn't very significant.

Kleinzahler wrote that Berryman's use of "black face" Henry in his Dream Songs would mean he wouldn't be published if he were writing today -- interesting.

"The title of Eileen Simpson’s [Berryman's first wife] moving book about her marriage to Berryman, /Poets in Their Youth/, comes from Wordsworth: ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ . . something else to look forward to, perhaps, if I don't break my hip.

Lawrence


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