Régis Debray — as those who know me will be well aware — has been a writer, thinker, and activist I have greatly admired and have kept reading and rereading for forty-plus years. Gathering work for a book of essays, I came across my review of a book of journalistic articles by Debray called L’espérance au Purgatoire, or Hope in Purgatory — published back in 1980 by The New Statesman in London. I thought it worthwhile to post this piece today — in the hope that it might help spark what I perceive as a needed reassessment of how we, poets, writers, and intellectuals working in these Disunited States right now need to (re)focus our attempts to resist and (re)act. The question of the public intellectual — or rather of his/her absence — in this country has often exercised me.
After Christopher Brennan’s 1897 post-Mallarmean experiment, the Musicopoematographoscope, a handwritten, part-parody, part-founding poem in the history of Australian inventive poetics, it is difficult to find sustained instances of avant-garde or neo-avant-garde poetry in Australia. But there is one figure from the postwar period that stands out as coming close to such a representative: Harry Hooton (1908–1961). Hooton was a member of the anarchist Sydney PUSH movement, a leftist interlectual subculture that thrived from the ’40s to the ’70s and gathered loosely around the University of Sydney, and editor of the literary magazine 21st Century. Philosopher, poet, and raconteur, “unjustly neglected,” “forgotten,” “scorned by the literary establishment,” Hooton, who fashioned his own philosophy of “Anarcho-Technocracy” was a “cult figure in Sydney’s libertarian circles,” as the back cover of his 1961 collected poems Poet of the 21st Century put it. Harry Heseltine is similarly prophetic: “occasionally such a figure is suddenly seen to redefine himself at the center and to generate a whole new output of mainstream poetry.”
1. Harry Hooton (1908–1961)
After Christopher Brennan’s 1897 post-Mallarmean experiment, the Musicopoematographoscope, a handwritten, part-parody, part-founding poem in the history of Australian inventive poetics, it is difficult to find sustained instances of avant-garde or neo-avant-garde poetry in Australia. But there is one figure from the postwar period that stands out as coming close to such a representative: Harry Hooton (1908–1961).
In his April 24, 1985, presentation of "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," Nathaniel Mackey spoke about Sonny Rollins for six minutes or so. Hannah Judd of the PennSound staff has now segmented the entire recording of the talk by topic. Here is the segment on Rollins: LINK.
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The 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’t had any truck with the NYTBR, 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 — & I’m instantly a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” it was the same names I saw bandied about: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell. Clearly, the NYTBR suggests, nothing has happened in American poetry since then, though even back in 1967 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
[FB’d this in dismay on 5 March, but seems worthwhile to keep track of on my blog. It concerns a review of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall, but mainly Patricia Bosworth’s review of Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, by Kay Redfield Jamison.]
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The 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’t had any truck with the NYTBR, 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 — & I’m instantly in a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” 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 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
Ted Jenner, 'Writers in Residence and other captive fauna.' Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.
In New Zealand the poetic generation of 1946 surveyed the boundary fences, then jumped over them. From the late 1960s this generation has set both the poetic and the critical parameters for general and specialist discussion. Career-long attention has been given to Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, and Sam Hunt, who were all born in a year of notable publications such as The quest: words for a mime play (Charles Brasch), Jack Without Magic (Allen Curnow), The Rakehelly Man & Other Verses (A.R.D.
Régis Debray 'Chez Lui'
On the role of the public intellectual & journalism
Régis Debray — as those who know me will be well aware — has been a writer, thinker, and activist I have greatly admired and have kept reading and rereading for forty-plus years. Gathering work for a book of essays, I came across my review of a book of journalistic articles by Debray called L’espérance au Purgatoire, or Hope in Purgatory — published back in 1980 by The New Statesman in London. I thought it worthwhile to post this piece today — in the hope that it might help spark what I perceive as a needed reassessment of how we, poets, writers, and intellectuals working in these Disunited States right now need to (re)focus our attempts to resist and (re)act.
The question of the public intellectual — or rather of his/her absence — in this country has often exercised me.
The lives of the experimental poets 1–3
Harry Hooton, Jas H. Duke, Ania Walwicz
After Christopher Brennan’s 1897 post-Mallarmean experiment, the Musicopoematographoscope, a handwritten, part-parody, part-founding poem in the history of Australian inventive poetics, it is difficult to find sustained instances of avant-garde or neo-avant-garde poetry in Australia. But there is one figure from the postwar period that stands out as coming close to such a representative: Harry Hooton (1908–1961). Hooton was a member of the anarchist Sydney PUSH movement, a leftist interlectual subculture that thrived from the ’40s to the ’70s and gathered loosely around the University of Sydney, and editor of the literary magazine 21st Century. Philosopher, poet, and raconteur, “unjustly neglected,” “forgotten,” “scorned by the literary establishment,” Hooton, who fashioned his own philosophy of “Anarcho-Technocracy” was a “cult figure in Sydney’s libertarian circles,” as the back cover of his 1961 collected poems Poet of the 21st Century put it. Harry Heseltine is similarly prophetic: “occasionally such a figure is suddenly seen to redefine himself at the center and to generate a whole new output of mainstream poetry.”
1. Harry Hooton (1908–1961)
After Christopher Brennan’s 1897 post-Mallarmean experiment, the Musicopoematographoscope, a handwritten, part-parody, part-founding poem in the history of Australian inventive poetics, it is difficult to find sustained instances of avant-garde or neo-avant-garde poetry in Australia. But there is one figure from the postwar period that stands out as coming close to such a representative: Harry Hooton (1908–1961).
Nathaniel Mackey on Sonny Rollins
In his April 24, 1985, presentation of "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," Nathaniel Mackey spoke about Sonny Rollins for six minutes or so. Hannah Judd of the PennSound staff has now segmented the entire recording of the talk by topic. Here is the segment on Rollins: LINK.
And here are links to all the segments:
Reading the NYTBR on Bishop and Lowell
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The 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’t had any truck with the NYTBR, 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 — & I’m instantly a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” it was the same names I saw bandied about: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell. Clearly, the NYTBR suggests, nothing has happened in American poetry since then, though even back in 1967 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
[FB’d this in dismay on 5 March, but seems worthwhile to keep track of on my blog. It concerns a review of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall, but mainly Patricia Bosworth’s review of Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, by Kay Redfield Jamison.]
So, trying to relax on a windy & cold Sunday morning, I turn to the just-delivered paper The 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’t had any truck with the NYTBR, 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 — & I’m instantly in a time-warp of major proportions. Fifty years ago when I first came to this country & city & opened the “paper of record,” 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 — I first typed 1067, & it could as well be 1050 years ago — they were completely out of touch with what had in American poetry in the twentieth century, & a fortiori, its lineaments after WWII.
Messages from the Antipodes
Ted Jenner
In New Zealand the poetic generation of 1946 surveyed the boundary fences, then jumped over them. From the late 1960s this generation has set both the poetic and the critical parameters for general and specialist discussion. Career-long attention has been given to Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, and Sam Hunt, who were all born in a year of notable publications such as The quest: words for a mime play (Charles Brasch), Jack Without Magic (Allen Curnow), The Rakehelly Man & Other Verses (A.R.D.