Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Educated in Geneva and Spain, Borges, as John Barth notes, "seems to have read almost everything." His lectures and writings are scholarly without being bookish. (He deprecates "Cyclical Light," an early poem, as "priggish." "Of course I was young when I wrote it. I had to work in all those Greek names.") The broad background frames but never inhibits his intelligent, singular and personal world. Robert Lowell, introducing the fantast at a reading Wednesday night, called Borges' work amid that of other writers "always an oasis in a sea of competence...
Aside from writing a tone poem, Verdi wrote brilliant accompaniment, using a lot of strings and woodwinds to give the music an uncanny gossamer, translucent sound. Verdi always leaves the range where the voices are pitched free from interference, so that the audience can hear nearly every word of the text...
...merciless phrases. "He was immensely cruel," John Berryman writes, "and the extraordinary thing about it is that he didn't know he was cruel." Jarrell had some pity for bad poets ("it is as if writers had sent you their ripped out arms and legs with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick.") but he could write nothing kind about their poems. And even a few of his memorialists (Allen Tate, for instance) clearly bear scars from the lash of his terrible swift tongue...
Jarrell had to be brave to even attempt a poem so simple as this. There is no structured poetic theory like Stevens', between him and his subject, no fluffy metaphor to make the horror manageable, no "T. S. Eliotscotch-tape," as one of his memorialists says, to put the shattered lost world together again. And this is where Jarrell parts company with most of his contemporaries...
...favorite writer was Proust and in his final book, The Lost World, he dipped back into his Hollywood childhood in two long poems. Though he tries to escape into the past, the book has residues of bitterness against the present from a collection of violent essays entitled A Sad Heart in the Supermarket he wrote in the early '60s. In The Lost World he writes a wonderfully weary poem of the suburban house that could have the same title as his earlier anthology...