Free Thinking and Official Verse Culture:
A Bibliographic Supplement (New York Times+ Dossier)

Originally compiled for a 2009 Penn graduate seminar "Poetry and Ideology: The Aesthetics of Resistance and Complicity." Includes background references for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press, 2024): "Free Thinking: Spring and All versus The Waste Land at 100"; "The Brink of Continuity"; "Summa Contra Gentiles," especially "Come Back to the Raft, Lionel, Baby! The Jewish Imagination, 1950"; and "Stein Stein Stein."

Kacper Bartczak
"Language and Post-Language Poets" in Robert Lowell in Context, ed. Thomas Austenfeld andGrzegorz Kość (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Frank Bidart
Charles Bernstein and Bidart: Fulcrum Debate, 2008

Harold Bloom
On "The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry” in Commentary (March 1972) and letters in response. Bloom dismisses Zukofsky in a puff but takes a few beats to declare Reznikoff, along with all Jewish-American poets writing in English, "failed." He calls out Ginsberg's "mock-bardic" "egregious" and "lame invocations" but is more respectful to Irving Feldman, though, in the end, judges him as one of a bunch of inidstinguishable "minor" Jewish poets, lacking the "high individuality" of the Christian canon he favors. He does not cite Eigner or Antin or Rothenberg or (Riding) Jackson, yet he has a welcome tribute to Samuel Greenberg. Most telling: Bloom, enthralled by the misprisons [sic] of his Lacanized (flipped) Electra complex –– kill the Jewish mother (mamaloshen), marry the Christian father (symbolic oder), is incapalble of mention Stein. (Yes, mamaloshen is also English in America.) Bloom collected his essay in Figures of Capable Imagination (New York Seabury Press, 1976). Bloom recaps his views in "The Heavy Burden of the Past" in the Times Book Review, Jan. 4, 1981: Ameircan Jewish poets don't "matter or urgently or overwhelmingly in the way that Frost, Stevens, Crane, Bishop, Warren, Ashbery, Merril or Ammons do." But perhaps they do matter in the way that Willliams, Pound, H.D., Loy, Hughes, Tolson, Olson, and Baraka do.
•Jerome Rothenberg's reply: "Harold Bloom: The Critic as Exterminating Angel” (from his Poetics & Polemics: 1980-2005)
Cited in "Free Thinking"

Stephanie Burt
•Ellipitcal Poetry
•Bernstein and Burt on "experiment" (Rutgers, 2013)

Dan Chiasson (New Yorker poetry review/feature ed.)
On Rae Armantrout in the New Yorker, May 2010

Dennis Donogue
On Ashbery's Shadow Train (NY Times): Best discussion of a blow job in the Book Review: "Even in one of the more available poems, 'Or in My Throat' - though the title is opaque to me -- Mr. Ashbery catches himself in the act of being sweet and gives sourness the last words: "That's why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It's clean, it's relaxing, it doesn't squirt juice all over. Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face. Is a stranger and no one can tell you it's true. Hey, stupid!"
•On H.D, titled "Her Deepest Passion Was D.H. Lawrence" (NY Times): "The later poems largely abandon the pedantry of Imagism." Folllowing up on the discussion of "Or in My Throat": "The limitation of H.D.'s poetry, early and late, arises from her habit of making premature equations." Equations? "Her mind was infatuated with coincidences, loose etymologies, conjunctions that seemed to connect anything with anything. . . ." And, as the headline insists, her deepest passion, and the most significant thing about her, was not her poetry, not her relation with Bryher, but her connection to Lawrence, the icon of masculinity.
•On "the slander" of Eliot on account of "the animus against Christianity [that is] is rampant and vicious in our profession." in "A Response to Ronald Schuchard." Modernism/modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 37-39: Project Muse. "I have no doubt that Eliot meant to emphasise "free-thinking" more than "Jews," but he specified Jews rather than any other group of people who had a religion which they either practiced or abandoned. If he had said "free-thinking New Humanists" we would not now be arguing the matter." Donogue is right that the issue for him, for Eliot, for Official Verse Culture, is not Jews but "free thinking."

T. S. Eliot
•After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934) and The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). •Anthony Julius: "Reflections on T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form" (1998)
•Modernism/modernity 20003 (10:1) forum on topic, with Dennis Donogue (see above), Marjorie Perloff, and others: Project Muse.
Cited in "Free Thinking"

Clayton Eshleman
"The Gospel According to Norton"

Library of Congress
"What Do Poet Laureates Do," 2012: LOC (quoted in "Free Thinking")

William Logan / NY Times
On Oxford Book of American Poetry [in which he is not included] (April_16, 2006): "John Ashbery receives nearly twice as many pages as Pound and almost three times as many as Robert Lowell ... (You can get the idea of Ashbery in two pages -- almost everything after that is sludge.) It's simply madness to reduce John Berryman to half a dozen pages and Randall Jarrell to 5 ...while lavishing 8 on Charles Bukowski and 10 on James Schuyler. ... Samuel Greenberg ... Wheelwright and dozens of other trivial worthies (even on a bad day, a battered stanza by Eliot makes these poets look like a dish of mealworms)."
On Hart Crane (January 28, 2007): "Much of 'The Bridge' seems inert now --overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney. ... Reading 'The Bridge' is like being stuck in a mawkish medley from ''Show Boat'' and 'Oklahoma.' ... Crane tried to make it among the big-city literary men, gripping a rum in one hand and a copy of ''The Waste Land'' in the other. Had beauty been enough, he might even have succeeded." ––Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’!
On Michael Palmer (May,28, 1989): "Reading Mr. Palmer's poetry is like ... slamming your head against a streetlight stanchion."
Leslie Scalapino letter: "William Logan's review of Michael Palmer's book 'Sun' was completely reactionary. It is disgraceful that when you allow innovative poetry to be reviewed, it is to enable it to be trashed. A reviewer who is so closed as to regard even such poets as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery as fraudulent is not capable of understanding contemporary innovation."
Brian Henry's commentary at Verse.

Charles McGrath (NY Times, then Book Review ed., also connected to New Yorker)
on Robert Lowell June 15, 2003: "Lowell may have belonged to the last generation to believe seriously in the poetic vocation. His friends and colleagues, all born around World War I, included Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke. ... Poems still get written, naturally, but the flames, one suspects, don't burn quite so hot these days. Poets behave better, live longer and probably settle for less. If someone of Lowell-like talent and Lowell-like ambition were to come along now, it's not a given that poetry would be his or her No. 1 career choice."
McGrath is discussed in "Brink of Continuity"

Douglas Messerli
"What Is to be Done?" ( 2006)

Paul Muldoon
The New Yorker appoints Paul Muldoon poetry editor (news story, Sept. 20, 2007: "Mr. Remnick added that the selection of Mr. Muldoon ... did not represent ''some sort of radical aesthetic or theoretical shift.' He added, ''It's not as if we went from a structuralist to a post-structuralist or a Beat to a conservative.'' "Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job."

David Orr (principal NY Times poetry consultant)
On Elizabeth Bishop (April 2, 2006): "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces -- Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray -- but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop."

Don Paterson
Introduction to New British Poetry, ed. with Charles Simic (Graywolf Press, 2004): Paterson decries the narrowness of "incomprehensible" UK postmodernist and US L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and argues for their exclusion as worthelss –– in the name of openness. "One can no longer say incomprehensible rubbish, for incomprehension is no longer the undesirable reader-response 1t used to be. Incomprehension now has its aficionados, its exegetes, and its champions, who are able to detect as many shades of confusion as Buddhists do the absolute. ... The Postmoderns have dispensed with the ground of consensual meaning ... their emotional palette1s so meagrely provided, it leaves them capable of nothing more than monotone angst, an effete and etiolated aestheticism, and a kind of joyless wordplay ... the first literary movement to have conceived the master stroke of eliminating the reader entirely. ... The Mainstream, on the other hand, remain deeply engaged with the messy business of communication."

William H. Pritchard
On Library of America anthologies of American Poetry (April 2, 2000) (NY Times): "Major chunks of both volumes are also given over to Marianne Moore [42], H. D. [40] and Gertrude Stein [39]. (In the case of the last two, perhaps excessively. Stein thought her effusions in "Tender Buttons" were poems, but almost 15 pages of them didn't convince me.)" Too much space for the free-thinking Jews: "Zukofsky, Oppen [25] and Charles Reznikoff [8] get more space than (it seems to me) they're collectively or individually worth." But not enough Frost [59]: absence of "The Gift Outright" decried: "The land was ours before we were the land’s" –– indeed! . "I balked at giving the exquisite [John Crowe] Ransom only 14 pages as contrasted with Zukofky's 31 or Rukeyser's 20. ... And, says the Times, although Bishop [32] is generously represented, she deserves even more space.

Jed Rasula
American Poetry Wax Museum (National Council of Teachers of English, 1996)

Michael Robbins
"Remember the Yak": On Ashbery, London Review of Books, Sept. 2010: "It’s harmless fun (don’t tell the Language poets), but once you’ve read a few hundred specimens you start to think: surely the point wasn’t to give over the entire typewriter factory to the monkeys."

Charles Simic
On Armantrout in NY Review of Books, June 2010: If you were stuck in prison, what would you rather have under your pillow: a volume by Emily Dickinson or one by Gertrude Stein?"

On Gertrude Stein
Bernstein: "Gertude and Alice's in Vichyland" & Dossier
Cited in "Stein Stein Stein"

On William Carlos Williams
Forum in William Carlos Williams Jounral (41:1; 2024) on thr 40th anniversary of my "The Academy in Peril: WCW Meets the MLA,” with essays by Juliana Spahr, Bob Perelman, presented at the 2023 MLA, along with essays by Helene Aji, Christopher MacGowan, and Hazel Smith. My response to "Academy in Peril," "Free Thinking," was also presented at the 2023 MLA; it is published in The Kinds of Poetry I Want. My follow up, and response to the forum, published in the WCW Jounral, is "Which Side Are You On" (with special reference to Randall Jarrel).
• The WCW society published a free PDF of "The Academy in Peril" as a supplement ot the forum.

Helen Vendler (Vendler had key roles in the poetry coverage of the NY Times, NY Review of Books. and New Yorker):
•On Rothenberg's America: A Prophecy (NY Times, 1973: "Never mind, dear reader, that you never thought Marcel Duchamp belonged in an anthology of American Poetry, or that anonymous schizophrenics did either ... The "hidden aspects" of American poetry are clarified here, not by the best work of our best poets, but by poems of H.D., Zukofsky, Rexroth, Oppen, Fearing, Patchen, Olson, Duncan,etc., as well as by Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marsden Hartley, Sherwood Anderson, Haniel Long and Lorine Neidecker, supplemented by poets who were "born elsewhere but did much of their mature work in America": Mina Loy, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Giovanitti, Sadakichi Hartmann, Anselm Hollo, and Chögyam Trangpa. ... What students hear in [the Jewish] Ginsberg they would hear and appreciate in Blake, as Ginsberg himself has been the first to show them; what they discover in Hesse they would embrace in Rilke, if only they were taught him; what they sense in [the JeDylan or Cohen is, if they only knew, waiting for them, to a degree that would satisfy them far more, in Keats. ... American poetry ... deserves better than this distortion of its history."
• & Rothenberg letter in response
•On Jorie Graham in NY Review of Books, June 12, 2008: "And Graham, unlike such Language Poets as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe (whose moment seems to have expired), always rewardingly makes sense, whatever her acrobatics." & letter in response.