Off the Shelf by Doug Holder

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Off the Shelf is a column in The Somerville Times ( Formerly The Somerville News) penned by Doug Holder. Holder has written for The News and Times since 2002. This piece consists of a review of " Inside the Outside" an anthology of avant-garde poets that Holder was included in. Also included is a small review of a book by poet, translator David Slavitt.


Off the Shelf by Doug Holder for the week of Feb. 15

Off the Shelf by Doug Holder for the week of Feb. 15

\u201cInside The Outside\u201d gets inside avant-garde American poets

I just received my contributor\u2019s copy of \u201cInside the Outside\u2026\u201d from the folks at the Presa Press. Roseanne Ritzema, the editor of this collection of avant-garde poets writes in her introduction: \u201cEvery year or so, an anthology is produced which marks an epoch. \u2018The New American Poetry,\u2019 (ed. Donald Allen) appeared in 1960. The poets gathered in this volume represent the major schools of the American literary avant-garde as it has developed over the past 50 years.

\u201cIf a poetry reader seeks the avant-garde, he will have difficulty finding it on bookstore shelves, which are filled with the old boys of the upper class New England literary mafia, imitators of their parents\u2019 generation of post-war poets... The establishment turns a cold shoulder toward the children of Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe, but the joke is on them\u2026.

This volume brings together 13 major poets of the American small press scene, each representing an important branch of the avant-garde as it has developed over the past 50 years. In most cases, the poems were selected by the poets themselves.\u201d

I am thrilled to be included in this anthology of poets I\u2019ve heard about and read for many years. The book includes many legendary small press poets, many of whom founded their own small presses, and magazines. On these pages you will find the poetry of Richard Morris, Lyn Lifshin, A.D. Winans, Lynne Savitt, Richard Kostelantz, Hugh Fox, and others\u2026

Each poet has a section, and each section has a sort of description of their work. For instance in the Hugh Fox section it reads: \u201cIt achieves universality through the representation of personal experiences combined with public/cultural images to present the poet as an everyman\u2026\u201d And in the poem \u201cFrom Eternity,\u201d this description is very apt:

\u201cthe pigeons/sailing off the top of/ the red brick warehouse/ in the oblique almost-winter/ late afternoon sun, white/ ceramic tile, green-painted/ steel copper cornices and/
balustrades, one apartment/ house with the west side/ curved all the way down,/probably living rooms, Margaret 25, Rebecca 3/months, Bernadette 49. Chris/
16, me 66, the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first/ centuries closing in/ around me.\u201d

With Harry Smith the description reads: \u201cHe believes that poets have the primary responsibility for the description of history.\u201d And in \u201cMe, the People,\u201d Smith tackles the starving masses yearning to breathe free:

\u201cMe the people had enough. Out of the gorge of city
This glittering Bicentennial I come,
Fat & discontent after my feasty Christmastide,
down to dark, stilled docks trimmed with Yule electric glit
at grayday unseen sundown and watch the steel
dusk deepening across my home harbor
most fabulous and most dreamed\u2014

My lady of liberty
Seen everywhere, beckoning\u201d

And Lynne Savitt: \u201cUses a stream-of-consciousness approach combined with run-on lines to evoke innerpersonal & interpersonal relationships. And here is a signature Savitt piece, hot and to the point like a red poker:

Writing

my friend Leo says
it\u2019s okay to get
old & fat
to be remembered
as a blonde
dream carrying a rose
a pink velvet
ass bent over
a car fender
a warm mouth
wet as the tropics
all you need
to write, he says,
is the memory
he continues through
the phone wire
as you put yr
fingers under
the elastic of my
mauve lace panties
memory blazes
poems poems poems

To find out more about this title and others go to: http://www. presapress.com

Slavitt moves forward in "Re Verse: Essays On Poetry and Poets"

I am a sucker for anecdotes. And poet, translator, educator, David Slavitt knows how to tell a story. I met him when he was running for state representative against Tim Toomey. Of course Slavitt was trounced, but I found him a brilliant, charming, and a loquacious character. And since I am an old English major I was glad to get this collection of essays by Slavitt, \u201cRe Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets.\u201d From looking at the title I was afraid the book would be dry as a spinster on Saturday night, but I was proven wrong. Slavitt offers up a very amusing and colorful memoir of poets he knew during his undergraduate years at Yale (in the 1950\u2019s), and during his long career as a writer. In his essay: \u201cHarold Bloom and the Decline of Civility,\u201d Slavitt recounts the time when as a student at Yale, he met the caustic, young critic Harold Bloom, when Bloom was a mere teaching assistant. Slavitt remembers that Bloom was wearing \u201ca deplorable tie,\u201d and he asked Bloom what he was working on:

\u201cShelley,\u201d he barked.

Slavitt informs the reader: \u201cI behaved badly, I\u2019m afraid. He was the most un-Shelleyan looking guy I had ever seen in my life. Curly Howard would have been a likelier enthusiast of the \u201cEpipsychidion.\u201d I laughed aloud, I am ashamed to say. Bloom looked hurt\u2014he had the soulful eyes of a basset hound and they still have a baleful look to them.\u201d

Slavitt was also a student of Robert Penn Warren. Even in those days Slavitt had a vast amount of chutzpah. He greatly admired Warren, but he panned his book, \u201cBand of Angels,\u201d in the Yale student newspaper. He then had the temerity to ask Warren for his inscription in Slavitt\u2019s copy of the book! And by George\u2026 he got it!

There are also some delicious accounts of a frosty Robert Frost, especially the time he trashed the poet Stephen Spender who was in the audience during Frost\u2019s reading at Yale.

Slavitt is an engaging writer, and the book will be of interest to both scholars and the less- studied of us, like your humble reviewer.

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