Word: brautigan
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...difficult to place him as a major artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but his contribution to literature is significant. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, probably his best novels, are both short, compressed and episodic, anticipating forms only now being elaborated by Brautigan and Barthelme. West's use of artifacts from mass culture and delicate caricatures during a time concerned with the purity of literature evidences his versatile and original talent. However, he made very little money from his novels and was forced to work in California as a screen writer, cranking out weekly...
...Peter Fonda, no Bob Dylan on the cover of "Highway 61 Revisited." He is soft-spoken, un??? pretentious, and probably doesn't even own ??? leather jacket. He is not looking for kicks ??? the fury of a Hell's Angel. He has worke??? photo-engraver, edited a magazine with ??? Brautigan (lifetime: one issue), studie???, been a teaching fellow at Harvard. His has ??? been the life of a rebel without a cause...
...that makes his motorcycle ride a ??? fitting symbolic gesture. Maybe it's that ???insohn is the kind of poet who seems to be ??? things in stride. Many of his poems appear ???halant at first, easy-going, like a conversation ???een two people who have met but are going ??? friends. Brautigan, of course, is the master ??? game; Sidney Goldfarb. also a Harvard ???-poet, is another player. (For instance: "On ??? to/ meet the astrologer/ 1 noticed my fly/ ??? down"). Loewinsohn plays it like he rode that ???cycle: real cool. "How can a girl with such a ???lly be so desirable?" he asks...
What does it take to wake us up? There is an American poetry more vital than Snodgrass, better than Brautigan, that we don't know about, that we can hardly even read because all along we've been taught to emulate a sensibility that just isn't our own. There was a vigor in my long high school poem, bad as it was, that nothing I've written since has equalled. Nobody's going to show us the books we need to be reading, especially not here. We have to find them for ourselves...
Richard Rosen's essay entitled "Go Away Richard Brautigan, You're Not Helping College Poetry Any," originally started out as a review of the college poetry anthology, Alkahest, but soon revealed itself to be a catalogue of the number and nature of the various ills now afflicting student poetry. It is definitely worthwhile reading, if not for the many good thoughts Rosen has on the subject, then at least for the gastronomic analogies with which he illustrates his points. It is a good idea to read it before reading the actual poetry clustered together on several of the issue...