personally, i'm immersed in poetry by sterling brown and edwin rolfe. specifically, poems that bring together racialized and working class bodies. anybody reading similar material? if not, what modernisms are you enjoying?
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Illinois
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Thu, September 13, 2007 - 11:21 AMI'm loving Mina Loy all over again. She is seriously underrated. And being intrigued by Jean Rhys.
But I'm getting a little away from the literary sort of modernism these days, and looking at the ways that ordinary folks in small towns lived modernism. The results are more fun and freakier than you might expect. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Sun, November 4, 2007 - 10:25 PMhow about some examples? -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Mon, November 5, 2007 - 8:18 AMYes, Cavafy counts as modernism. The trend is to go more global these days.
Just finished a Modernism conference in fact, where one of the coolest things I learned was that there was a modernist revival in Brazil in the 40s and 50s, when it had been more or less dropped everywhere else. It was one of the only places where Pound remained cool. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Tue, November 6, 2007 - 10:03 PMAwww...jesus, and I was in Boise! (I don't think there's anything even remotely Modernist in Boise-if there is, it may be the only interesting thing existent in that most dull of capital cities).
I actually had an online book friend asking about mid-20th century Brazilian and Latin American modernism a couple of months back. I didn't have much to say-sounds like your conference would have been right up his alley. I'd love to hear more.
Have you read Olive Moore, Shannon? I just recently read her novel 'Spleen' (published most recently by the Dalkey Archive: www.centerforbookculture.org/dal...leen ) and was deeply impressed. It's not necessarily a "sympathetic" or easy book but it is striking and often quite beautiful.
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Fri, October 26, 2007 - 6:32 AMI am a bookseller and collector so I'm always flipping through different books. Most recently I've been reading poems by W.B, Yeats. He's way Irish and I love that.
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Sun, November 4, 2007 - 10:25 PMC.P. Cavafy
Does he count as Modernism? I don't care, let us rue category.
His poems are beautiful -- they lament how stifling modern society can be to an individual, and he also delves deep into the strengths of classical Greek mythology and history.
I'm reading the recent Barnstone translation and am marking the salient poems, to go back and read them in as many translations as possible -- a feat everyone ought to practice while reading translations.
I recently finished Olson's "Call Me Ishmael" and now want to read a lot more Melville because of it, but he might have to take a backseat because Proust is up next. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Wed, November 7, 2007 - 8:00 AMI've been reading a lot of Marianne Moore's prose and letters lately, and she's turned me on to some great stuff. In a letter to H.D. she wrote:
"I am glad you like D. H. Lawrence's 'Snake'; he has a story in the August Metropolitan about a tailless peacock named Joe-y. It is just like D. H. Lawrence to write about a tailless peacock, isn't it, pathologically humanitarian as he is?"
Moore's extreme sensitivity to defining qualities of character in persons and things, alertness to the delightful, and crystalline prose style are all wonderfully in evidence in this excerpt.
I did read "Snake" after this, and it IS quite wonderful!
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Wed, November 7, 2007 - 11:43 PMI've been reading John Cowper Powys' "Wolf Solent" and I can see how writers as diverse as Dreiser, Henry Miller and V.S. Pritchett were seduced by this fellow's electric sentences. No one else has ever quite caught the way he can make ordinary life seem like a hallucination.
I also lugged a battered New Directions hardback of Pound's "Cantos" with me on an extended Metro trip today, taking in long blasts of Ezra's gnarled intoxications while sitting in traffic on Wilshire. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Thu, November 8, 2007 - 1:10 PM> I also lugged a battered New Directions hardback of Pound's "Cantos" with me on an extended Metro trip today
How's that going for you? I'm into relatively difficult stuff, but every time I approach Cantos I find myself muttering "What the hell?" It's sort of like Finnegans Wake for me - I have a vague understanding of what Pound is doing, but the work-to-pleasure ratio is all out of whack.
I love early Pound though ... Lustra, Exulatations, Cathay, et cetera. Sublime! And his rendering of Seafarer is one of my all-time favorites. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Fri, November 9, 2007 - 10:30 AM<<How's that going for you?>>
Most wondrous. Finnegan's Wake has much the same charm, in fact. "Anna Livia Plurabelle" sounds incredible read aloud.
The Cantos are turning out similarly- great gusts of printed sound. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Fri, November 9, 2007 - 10:49 AM>great gusts of printed sound.
Heh. That's Pound exactly: great and gusty.
I don't share your taste for him as a poet. Compared to those whose careers he promoted, and although his translations were lovely, I think he's actually second-rate. But he was probably the most brilliant and effective editor, marketer and PR agent modernism ever had. Plus, he was just really helpful to a lot of people. I'd have liked to have known him, though I think that his deliberate loud crudeness probably would have gotten on my nerves. -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Fri, November 9, 2007 - 1:57 PM> The Cantos are turning out similarly- great gusts of printed sound.
I can imagine you drawing a few stares reading Pound aloud (hopefully with gusto) on the subway. : ) -
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Wed, November 21, 2007 - 12:31 AMI've just been rediscovering The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey, "the sun like an orange in a fried fish shop". Lots of William Blake references in this novel about a cranky old painter in 1930s London. A fun novel.
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Re: what's on your reading plate these days?
Fri, November 9, 2007 - 2:09 PM<<great and gusty. >>
Yes. He self-consciously modeled himself on the bardic, troubadour tradition, so it's hard to avoid talking about him the same way one would an actor. He also liked music and there's much in him to amuse and instruct a rock critic.
<<though I think that his deliberate loud crudeness probably would have gotten on my nerves.>>
Irresistibly, these lines from another great modernist (archy the cockroach) come to mind-
coarse jocosity
catches the crowd
shakespeare
and i
are often
low browed
the fish wife
curse
and the laugh
of the horse
shakespeare
and i
are frequently
coarse
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