Imagine, if you will, The Selected Poems of Robert Lowell as edited by Larry Fagin. Fagin is a serious reader & would no doubt attempt to arrive at the best possible selection. But, let’s face it, he’s not whom you might think of if you were doing a selected Lowell, simply because they don’t share the same aesthetics.
What about, as an alternative, Robert Grenier? As a poet, Grenier is undoubtedly an extremist. His scrawl texts seem to be having an impact in the art market – you can get them from the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea at a pretty penny (the poem above reads, if you look carefully, A / RED / HOUSE / BORN). As an editor for Robert Lowell, Grenier has an advantage over Larry Fagin – not only has Grenier demonstrated his ability to produce a major selected through his work with Robert Creeley (you can see his selection, which was never published, in the 1978 issue of boundary 2 dedicated to Creeley’s work), but Grenier was a student of Lowell’s, an influence he has never rejected.
Am I the only person who thinks that there might be a bit of a hubbub should FSG or The Library of America or whomever make such a choice somewhere down the road? I suspect not.
Yet I haven’t heard any such fuss in the other direction with regards to Robert Pinsky’s editing the work of William Carlos Williams for The Library of America’s American Poets Project. Like Fagin & Grenier, Pinsky has always struck me as a smart, open-minded, serious person. The fact that he did not rush off some patriotic doggerel in the wake of September 11th when, as Poet Laureate, he might have been expected to do so has always struck me as a sign of great integrity.
But Robert Pinsky’s aesthetics are not those of William Carlos Williams. Not even close. And given (a) that there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of qualified editors in this country (one example, Bob Creeley) whose aesthetics do have some perceptible relationship to Williams and (b) that Williams was himself a militant opponent of the School of Quietude that Pinsky represents so well, the choice of an editor here is, shall we say, revisionist at the very least? I’ll leave it to others to suggest the more paranoid or conspiratorial adjectives.
It is, at minimum, inappropriate save as an act of audacious reframing, as in “This is the School o’ Quietude Williams.” There is actually nothing wrong with that, just as there would be nothing wrong with Grenier or Fagin editing Lowell. What might be wrong, however, or at least duplicitous, would be to pass the project off as any other than as a radical reinterpretation.
It is not that Pinsky has done an especially dreadful job, yet there are just six of the 49 poems from The Wedge here, the 1944 book that most influenced the generation of poets who emerged in the 1950s, just four poems from The Desert Music, whose title poem is not included. Nothing of Paterson appears to have been included, and none of the prose poems of Kora in Hell. “Black winds from the north,” “What about all this writing?” and “The universality of things,” are missing from the selection taken from Spring & All. I would have to sit with this book awhile, yet my gut feel at this point is that one could read Pinsky’s Williams without having to confront exactly what is most special about Williams: the artist utterly willing to overturn any convention in his quest for meaning. Given the wide distribution that this series is apt to get, especially via Barnes & Noble & Borders, an emasculated Williams is a tragedy.
This is not the first time that Williams has been ill-served by a selected poems. All of my kvetches about this edition could more or less equally be laid at the door of the volume done by Charles Tomlinson, first in 1963 & later in 1985. Tomlinson at least was under Williams’ spell when first embarking on the project – his own American Scenes remains the editor’s best book, at least to a Yankee’s ear. But like Pinsky, the British Tomlinson comes to American letters with a sense of it as a tributary of English (read British, read Island as Charles Bernstein has so usefully characterized it) writing. That is a view & understanding of literature that Williams forcefully refuted his entire life. And that has gone missing once again.
