[lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the beginning of 72
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:12:52 -0400
Alcohol releases inhibitions, prompting, as they say, the act but ruining
the performance. If alcohol improved anything cognitive, or anything at
all, then drunk driving would not be against the law. I'm sure Hart Crane
thought he was brilliant when drunk.
As to Lawrence's contention that Berryman was happy but drank himself to
death anyway, followed by actually jumping off a bridge to his death, if
Berryman was happy drunk, then why did he stop drinking, given that he
killed himself anyway? Why didn't he just happily drink himself to death?
As far as someone pronouncing there is no unconscious, well that certainly
settles it. There was no Stalin-Hitler pact because the Soviets said there
wasn't, there was no Holocaust because some say there isn't, there is no
unconscious because someone proclaimed there isn't. An appropriate
mentality for these here New Middle Ages, no doubt about that.
> [Original Message]
> From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 10/11/2006 4:36:51 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the beginning of 72
>
> Lawrence wrote:
>
> > it was commonly believed among poets, painters, and novelists that
drinking
> > enhanced one's talent. One could more readily reach one's muse under
the
> > influence.
>
> Hart Crane comes immediately to mind. There's a good discussion of
> Crane and his place in American letters, including some vignettes of his
> encounters with his drunken muse, in a discussion of his work on the
occasion
> of his being given a volume of the Library of America.
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/061009crbo_books1
>
> 'Crane was almost unique in preferring to write while he was actually
drunk.
> Malcolm Cowley, in ?Exile?s Return,? his memoir of New York and Paris in
> the nineteen-twenties, recalled the way Crane would slip away from a
> bacchanalian party to write verse:
>
> 'Gradually he would fall silent, and a little later he disappeared. In
lulls
> that began to interrupt the laughter, now Hart was gone, we would hear a
new
> hubbub through the walls of his room--the phonograph playing a Cuban
rumba, the
> typewriter clacking simultaneously; then the phonograph would run down
and the
> typewriter stop while Hart changed the record, perhaps to a torch song,
perhaps
> to Ravel's ?Bolero.?. . . An hour later . . . he would appear in the
kitchen
> or on the croquet court, his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already
> iron-gray hair bristling straight up from his skull. . . . In his hands
would
> be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript, with words crossed out
and
> new lines scrawled in. ?R-read that,? he would say. ?Isn't that the
> grreatest poem ever written?? '
>
> Robert Paul
> The Reed Institute
>
>
>
>
>
>
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